KJR Studios
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA
© Kameelah Janan Rasheed. All rights reserved.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner*, seeker**, and harvester*** from East Palo Alto, CA.
Her middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic triliteral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking that which is anticipated yet obscured; tangled but potent; abundant, ephemeral, and unmoored. Moving in the spirit of her name, Rasheed’s work explores the mercurial nature of language, embracing its “unintelligible,” unsanctioned, unseen, and chimeric dimensions.
A neurodivergent**** artist informed by her sensory misfires and abundance, Rasheed explores dirty data, leakage, and excess as revelatory moments that can shape our relationship to knowledge production, valuation, and distribution.
Working mainly with text across installation, video, publication, code, archives, performance, and other forms yet to be determined, Rasheed’s visual vernacular references annotation, redaction, overwriting, diagramming, and marginalia. This visual vernacular is inflected by witnessing her parents’ note-taking process, which included collage, bespoke modes of layered archiving, and variations of typeface and handwriting. Her art-making praxis is further informed by the lineage of Southern Black writers and artists working in traditions of spirit writing, glossolalia, and hermetic language systems across a range of substrates, and esoteric Islamic diagrams.
A death doula in training, she explores the softened edges and the leakage between life, death, afterlife, and haunting. For Rasheed, her death doula training manifests in how she sees how each of her projects haunts other works, leaving vestigial marks or lurking ghosts, a typographic flickers, a textual echo, or scalar inversion.
Rasheed is represented byNOME (Americas and Europe).
Her middle name, Janan, comes from the Arabic triliteral root (J-N-N / جنان), evoking that which is anticipated yet obscured; tangled but potent; abundant, ephemeral, and unmoored. Moving in the spirit of her name, Rasheed’s work explores the mercurial nature of language, embracing its “unintelligible,” unsanctioned, unseen, and chimeric dimensions.
A neurodivergent**** artist informed by her sensory misfires and abundance, Rasheed explores dirty data, leakage, and excess as revelatory moments that can shape our relationship to knowledge production, valuation, and distribution.
Working mainly with text across installation, video, publication, code, archives, performance, and other forms yet to be determined, Rasheed’s visual vernacular references annotation, redaction, overwriting, diagramming, and marginalia. This visual vernacular is inflected by witnessing her parents’ note-taking process, which included collage, bespoke modes of layered archiving, and variations of typeface and handwriting. Her art-making praxis is further informed by the lineage of Southern Black writers and artists working in traditions of spirit writing, glossolalia, and hermetic language systems across a range of substrates, and esoteric Islamic diagrams.
A death doula in training, she explores the softened edges and the leakage between life, death, afterlife, and haunting. For Rasheed, her death doula training manifests in how she sees how each of her projects haunts other works, leaving vestigial marks or lurking ghosts, a typographic flickers, a textual echo, or scalar inversion.
Rasheed is represented by