Baseera Khan is a multidisciplinary installation artist whose work explores the relationships between surveillance and desire, and what is created and what is experienced, to discuss civil obedience within public and private spaces.
Khan’s work often unpacks public reliquaries, historical architecture, and sacred gardens. The artist offers uniforms of safety to navigate highly surveilled spaces, radical ornamentation, intimacy, and investigations into materials as identity forming parts of our lives. Khan uses soft and hard organic materials, color, textiles, sound, embossment and reliefs, upholstery and the transformation of utilitarian objects into deeply personal large format sculptures. Khan attempts to convert petroleum-based plastics into healing shields, crude oil into garden paintings, hair into climbing ropes, and indigenous rugs that wrap architecture. Khan’s large format sculptures expose how material resources and technologies in the everyday are not apolitical, but catalysts of global migration, power, and empire.
Born and raised in Texas of Indo-Islamic heritage and based in New York, Khan has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum (2021-22) and Art Basel Statements (2023) and created the public art commission "Painful Arc, Shoulder High," for the High Line Park in New York City in 2023-24.
Their work belongs to the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Khan is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University and an artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts.
More about the artist
Khan attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014), an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015) Abrons Art Center (2016–17) and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19) The Kitchen NYC (2020), Khan recently completed an artist residency at PLOP, London, UK (2024). Khan won an Artist Prize for the MTV/Smithsonian Channel TV docu-series, called The Exhibit in 2022-23. Khan is also a recipient of the UOVO Art Prize (2020), and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019).
“I am interested in material relationships to labor and family structures, religion and spiritual well-being,” says Khan. “I make work to discuss these materials and their economies, the effects of this relationship to reveal the intersections of power and culture. In my opinion, material creates identity, not the other way around. The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try not to reinstate these colonial labels in my work, instead I try to emancipate them by use of form and color, and performance—I abstract identity with multiple ways of working. My life's work is dedicated to the development of my own legacy, on my own terms, with the use of architecture, fashion, painting, photography, textiles, and music, parody, sculpture, and performance, I manifest my femme native-born Muslim American experience.”
Learn more at www.baseerakhan.com or @Baseerakhan on Instagram.
