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ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Welcome to This Being Human. I’m your host Abdul-Rehman Malik. On this podcast, I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world whose life, ideas and art are shaped by Muslim culture.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
What I’m here to do is not make things easy for people to categorize or headline or announce. What I’m here to do is to experience many things so that I can start building relationships between those things for myself, but also for future weird kids like myself.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:
It’s hard to describe what Kameelah Janan Rasheed does – and she likes it that way. Much of her work is about a search for knowledge and truth — which includes unlearning ideas that we’ve grown up with, and revisiting history through fragments. She calls herself porous, taking in everything around her. Her art spans photography, installations, sound, text and more. She’s created a semi-fictional archive of her own family history, and put up billboards with messages like “What have you (un)learned today?” and “Lower the pitch of your suffering.” Her work has been shown around the world and she has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. I spoke to Kameelah about resisting easy definitions, finding confidence, and even about how she’s thinking about the future of technology.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Kameelah, welcome to This Being Human.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Thank you so much for having me.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Kameelah, you have a show in Chicago right now called Unsewn Time. And there’s a quote from you in the show notes to the exhibition. And it kind of leaped out at me. It says, “How can we be anything but learners in a world that’s slowly revealing itself to us?” I know you’ve used that term learner to describe yourself in many different contexts as an artist, as a creative, as a writer. What do you mean when you call yourself a learner?

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Yeah, I mean, I think that it has been off putting, particularly when folks want to identify a clear medium or process or theme in my work. And when I say that I’m a learner, that really is coming from a position of humility. It’s a recognition that there is literally only so much that we can make sense of or even have access to knowing that we don’t know, that to be able to make grand statements of certainty just feels a bit silly to me. And I think about my family a lot because both of my parents in a lot of ways were very focused on education and of course like, go to school, get good grades, were really focused on sort of the self-discovery and self learning process. And I think a lot of that sort of spilled over into my life. And so when I say I’m a learner, I’m like literally in the world trying to not so much absorb, but like, make contact or graze up against different ideas and mediums and processes and organisms as a way to build not a clearer but a more robust or capacious understanding of the world. And I know that the way that I came into the world, through my parents and through Islam, had to do with them being in a process of learning themselves. They met in college at UC San Diego in the seventies, became Muslim together. And I have like my dad’s notes of when he was studying and I look at those quite frequently. But my mom was also a big reader. And I also look back and think about the times where I sort of watched her read or when you would go to do my prayer and the imam was delivering the khutbah and she is like sort of whispering to me and commenting, and so there’s always this thing of looking at the world and then being sort of the person on the side who’s like commenting, annotating, responding, but always being in the sort of state of of discovery or learning like, I really want to figure it out. But also if I don’t figure it out, the journey to try to even do that was also enjoyable.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Oh, I love this image of your parents sort of modeling this process of learning and becoming. You know, one of the first things one notices when they go on your website is that you have these fragments of writing from when you were a child and they’re actually like testimonies from you about who you are and in a way who you’re becoming. And they have such a confidence, Kameelah.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
[laughing]

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Firstly, what was the impetus to share those? Because they sat right there, right at the top. When I read your bio before I start reading words, I see these amazing fragments.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Yeah. I mean, when I look back at my like primary school self, from the age of like six to maybe eight or nine, I was like, wow, I was a confident little human being. And there are days where I wish that I could go back and grab that part of me because there was sort of an assertiveness about why I’m on this earth and what I’m doing that I think as you get older and encounter more things, that confidence or that certainty shifts. But I grew up in East Palo Alto, which is a small city in the peninsula in Northern California, and it’s known for everything, including its proximity to Elizabeth Holmes. It is known for tech companies, it is known for viol–, It’s known for a lot of things, but I think the one thing that it’s not known for is this period from the late sixties to the early eighties of all these different educational experiments where folks in my community literally got together and created the. At that time, if I remember correctly, the only nationally run oh, the only black run school system in the nation.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Wow.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
I wasn’t around for that time, but I’ve gone through the history, I’ve talked to people and I feel like my schooling experience sort of like riffed on elements and the residue of that experience. And so in primary school there was like literally an older woman in a trailer, and you could go to her during lunch and you could just make books. She had like a coil by a machine. She had all this like cardstock that had been discarded, that we could sort of cut down. She had paper, she would typewrite things. And I spent so much time there because I was so fascinated by the idea of like going to libraries and taking someone else’s book off the shelf. And so for me, I was like, So I can put a book on the shelf that I wrote. And then other people will read, like, there’s something that was so transformative about not being a passive consumer and being an active producer of knowledge or a negotiator of knowledge. And so I think the confidence that I had as a six and seven year old has now transformed into sort of this like measured curiosity where there are some things that I’m certain about. But at the same time, I always want to leave enough space for other things to sort of come in and sort of change or augment or like radically shift my worldview. But yeah, I just like, I just like text and sounds like a quantity thing to say, but I just love writing and I love reading and I love the exchange that happens when you, like dive and immersed in a piece of text. And I love the process of creating worlds as a writer that you then offer to someone else. And as Umberto Eco always talks about, then those people create these ghost chapters and these inferential walks alongside the text, so it feels like this long thread of like continuation or even a palimpsest or something about this relationality between the writing of something and how people are going to engage with it over time.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Kameelah’s first solo show was for a project called No Instructions for Assembly. It’s a sort of semi-fictional family archive. She doesn’t have a lot of photographs of her family. They lost their home at one point, and with it, a lot of family artifacts. For the project, she cobbled together photographs she found at garage sales, original photography, books, magazines, and more, to try to create something that feels like a family archive. She has called the project an attempt to conjure her family back into existence.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
 That was at Real Art Ways. And I remember applying for this like, new artist, never had a solo show, and I applied for this, this project and I got it. And so I had this space to create this exhibition. And I’ve always been interested in my family’s history and had done some other work, mostly collage-based, where I was thinking about my family’s history in relation to our houselessness, which was a period where we had to leave our home and to go to a family member’s home and that caused a lot of conflict. You lose a lot of things. And so since I was very young, I have this very anxious relationship to memory and a very anxious relationship to material culture, because some of it was lost or some of it was damaged. And as a person who is the descendant of enslaved people, also not being able to reach back to sort of make sense of who I am and this person. And my nan passed away in March and she was the last the eldest person left in our family. And so she was this holder of all this history. And it was really sad. I mean, sad for a lot of reasons, but in a lot of ways sad because it was sort of like all these stories die with her. And so for the past couple of months, I’ve been in this like deep, deep, deep genealogical research. But I think when I use this language of conjuring up, I’m thinking about like, how do people who are dispossessed of land, dispossessed of culture, displaced, make sense of family history when you can only sort of engage with fragments? And I didn’t want to make this some like, how do I say this, this aggressively affective emotional thing about displacement, because I think there’s a place for that work, too. But this was sort of like, how do I create almost a layered space of objects, of images, of feelings, of things in a space where they provide almost like an index to other things. They are an index to other things that maybe I can’t get access to, but I still want to note the possibility of their existence. So I may not have the full history, but at least I can point and say that something is over there and I can sort of annotate that something may be here.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Entering into your work is entering into a world of fragments but in an interesting way, Kameelah, for me, as someone experiencing your work, it doesn’t feel fragmentary, if you know what I mean. What you do and what’s so remarkable and compelling to me, is that you take those fragments and you build that kind of dark matter between them. And the other thing is that it doesn’t feel fixed. And maybe that’s something about memory, right? That that memory is not fixed. As you’re describing your own journey to discover the roots and the stories of your family, it really feels like this thing called memory is moving, evolving, reshaping constantly. I mean, Kameelah you must always have to be on, like you’ve got to be on to that, like you got to be kind to be tuned into that. It’s a lot. That’s a lot to hold. 

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Yeah. Yeah, I am excited about the reference to dark matter because there was a point where I thought that I was going to become a scientist because I had a really amazing science teacher from like five to like maybe third to fifth grade. And he was the first real scientist that I met. And he was this black man who loved marine biology. And he would take me and other students on trips to like collect water samples, so I was very interested in the sciences. And so when you made this reference to dark matter, it got me excited about quantum physics now, which is like, yes, because I think that for me I’ve done shows where people ask questions like, Oh, do you see any conflict between your interest in the sciences and Islam? And I’m like. No. Please explain to me where you see the conflict, because I think that… 

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
True. So true.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
And I don’t, I was like, you could actually read the Koran as a scientific text from everything from just like, lifecycles to, like, the basics of, like, celestial mechanics and orbiting like that. It’s, it’s there. And so I think that for me, this sort of notion of wanting to draw connections and this dark matter and sort of like the ecology of my work feels very important, because I’m not really interested in making work about science and I’m not really interested in making work about Islam, but I’m interested in is the ethos of of these traditions influencing the way that I think about my work, how I engage audiences with my work, how I sort of develop methodologies for my work. And I think the methodology that I sort of like go in with is a sense that like, on one hand, a lot constantly reminds us that like as soon as there’s that uh, verse in Surah Al-Kahf 109 where it’s like, if the oceans were ink for the words of my Lord, sooner with the ocean be exhausted before the words of my Lord. And whenever I give lectures, I often will begin somewhere around there. Because I want to remind folks that as soon as we think we know everything, that we captured everything, there’s like a million more things unfold and pull back the layers from. And so I think in terms of methodology, there is like this like aggressive curiosity about the world, but also this humility that what I learned yesterday could be like overturned the next day and so this dark matter reference is beautiful to me because it’s something that we’re still trying to make sense of. And I also have been reading a lot, obviously. And when you said I must always be on, I am always on. Last year, I got like a ADHD diagnosis, which is wild when you’re almost 40 for someone to be like, so just so you know, your brain works like this and other people’s brains work like this and you just, you know, you just didn’t know. And so it’s been interesting to sort of like think about the way that my brain works, which is like constantly desiring sort of like building connections, having poor sensory gating. So I’m taking in tons of stimuli. I’m a lucid dreamer, so it’s almost like I’m constantly processing information. And so I think one way that I make my work is through this methodology of like I’m constantly processing, processing and processing and the object you see in the space is literally what I was able to put into a form that was tangible for other people. But there’s still a lot more going on! This is just the form that was possible for the work, if that makes sense. But it’s not final because I’m going to revise it. [laughs]. 

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
It’s really beautiful what you said about all of this just kind of being baked into you. Faith, science, art, craft, understanding the world. And I think in some ways that’s what makes your work particularly interesting and draws us in, is that it’s really hard to categorize. And it is because you’re all of those things. And and and Kameelah is bringing all of herself into this moment, and we’re just capturing that moment.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
On one end, having a process that is not clearly categorizable or sort of shifts based upon my curiosity means that I’m like a moving target in a sense, right? You can’t say like Kameelah is a text based artist because I do work with text, but I also code and I also paint and I also teach. I also do standup. I also do improv. Like I’m doing a bunch of things because part of my time on this earth, I just want to try different things and see how they fit and so I can’t actually put a boundary around that. And so there is a sense of confidence that like what I’m here to do is not make things easy for people to categorize or headline or announce. What I’m here to do is to experience many things so that I can start building relationships between those things for myself, but also for future weird kids like myself. The confidence that you see now was like the cause of bullying as a child because, you know, eight, nine, ten year olds don’t get the kid who, like, wants to code and read weird books and like, dig up worms and like, also like, is interested in meteors and is like feeding, you know, mice to the hawks that come like, that’s confusing, right? As I’ve grown older, it’s a bit of a strange reversal for the things that I was often isolated or alienated for to become the things that people know me for and invite me to do. In this past show in Berlin, the one K, but I have to do it correctly, KW [pronounced in German] Institute, also known as KW, It was part of this Artist Research Award, and that word meant so much to me because I remember crying at the award ceremony, because people gave laudatory speeches and then I just started crying like a baby because I had never heard people really, like, talk about my work. And so I think that what feels good to me and the most current iterations of my life is feeling seen without the pressure for legibility. I often say I’m opaque to myself and I’ve been reading a lot of Clarice Lispector’s work and she constantly talks about her own opaqueness to herself. And so I just think that if you are opaque to yourself, how can I promise anything of transparency or legibility to anyone else? Like, I’m figuring out me, but you want me to package myself and give it to you in a neat package? If I could do that, I’d give it to myself. But I can’t do that. So what you get is this sort of like, mess, but it’s a mess not because of a lack of care. It’s a mess because literally life is messy. And there was a point where we didn’t have academic disciplines in academic fields that people live interconnected interdisciplinary lives, and they weren’t like, I’m going to go do science now and then I’m going to go do math and then I’m going to do history. People were just living. And knowledge was integrated. And so I think that there’s a part of my practice that hopes to return to this integrated, networked sort of sense of learning and being in the world where we’re not trying to like compartmentalize different facets of like existing in the pursuit of like legibility or clear understanding.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
That at that point about legibility, to me really hits the mark, in so many in so many ways, because it also it also, you know, when we’re not immediately legible, it also means that we are a process and we’re greater than the sum of our parts and we’re not linear. And you use this language a lot, Kameelah, the language of ecosystem. It’s like, it’s like you represent yourself as an ecosystem and there’s something in the materials that you use that, that, that kind of, that emerges as part of an ecosystem. You’re using photographic chemicals, you’re using, you know, photographic paper, you’re using Vaseline, you’re using ink, you’re using rubbing alcohol, you’re using mimeograph, you’re cutting fragments from text and from books. And all these disparate elements come together to create the piece. And then you do something that I don’t fully understand and I hope you’ll explain to me. You add your body to that, and then and then something remarkable happens. What is going on with all that?

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
If you look across my work, figuration sort of stops in 2013. And then, because I still have a complex relationship to figuration and representation and someone asked me about this in Berlin and they were like, why do you? And I was like, I think it’s because I grew up in a Muslim household where my dad was like, No, no, no, no, no statues, No, no, no, no. God is not a person on or in the image. So our house was mostly full of text. The things that littered my home was they were printed matter. And so my relationship to my body was not so much like a photograph or an image of me as a person, but it almost became the situation of what residue of human existence is left on printed matter. So I’m looking across things and seeing spilled coffee or seeing oil marks or seeing a torn page or seeing like something that was in a basement that’s chewed up by like all these things that sort of indicate presence and acting upon the printed matter was sort of how I started to relate to representation and figuration, that the the figure doesn’t have to be in the frame, but there are residues, elements, indices of human interaction that don’t necessarily need to be shown. And so when I was making this work for the show in Chicago, a bunch of think different things were happening literally with my with my body. My nan had passed away, which was his own full weight process of like jumping out of my body and jumping back. And I also got covered and it was like a really bad case. And like, these hives went crazy. I learned that I had this thing called oral allergy syndrome, which makes me like allergic to like most fruits because my brain interprets raw fruit enzymes as a birch tree. All these things were happening in my body that basically created like welts or markings on my skin. I also learned that I had like a pigmentation disorder, just like a lot of things were happening in the compressed period of time. And my therapist always talks to me about when icky things come up to sort of identify a stance of curiosity. So instead of being like, Oh, that sucks, she’s like, okay, what can we learn about this? What does a stance of curiosity look like? And so my stance of curiosity was basically trying to explore methods of writing with one’s body that when I make a print, I could of course use a printing press or an etching press to create the impression, to provide the weight. It’s an even weight, it’s evenly distributed. A piece of metal is doing it. And so I wanted to think about, if I want to write or include my body in my work, but I don’t actually want to write text letters, Latin alphabet, and I don’t want to include my face, what could I produce? And so I thought about my body in the way that only my body, because of weight distribution, because of the context of my living space, because of the humidity of my apartment, my body can only produce these types of marks. And so I became interested in the notion of our body in signature and got really interested in the body as something that can both be printed upon and can print, Right? And so if you think about sitting in a chair and the marks that are left on your legs because of the chair as these temporary markings. I was watching all the videos of Hajj during the height of the pandemic because only a few people were allowed to go. And I became really interesting, like the markings that are left behind by folks who are going on their pilgrimage from their feet and from the indentations on the ground from that circumambulation. I got really excited because I saw this video, this Instagram post of this prayer that had sort of the fabric had worn off in the place where his hands and arms were subdued. And I got so excited about this idea that a prayer rug could hold writing from someone’s body. The erosion is an indication, right, that that indeed writing has occurred. And I think about my dad’s prayer rugs and how degraded, and I was like, he just didn’t buy new prayer rugs. And I think secretly he does like the idea of being able to have that record. And so I just started thinking about all these things, tree rings, leaf iniation, snail slime, spiderwebs, lichen, all these sort of modes of writing that are not dependent on this notion that I’m taking a pen to paper, but that the substrate can be different, and so that was a long winded way to say that for this show in Chicago, I was grappling with all those ideas. I’m still grappling with them, and I’m really interested in our insistence around written history versus oral history, particularly within African diaspora cultures of oral tradition, but also Islamically, like the revelations came orally and then they were written down. And so even that whole process from oral to written and and so I’m really interested in sort of this engagement with the oral to written, written to oral, and our insistence on one form being better, or the idea that both forms need to be permanent.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
You speak about dreaming and lucid dreaming in particular. You know, these dreams that kind of forced us to question what is real and what is not. Kameelah, I won’t lie when I sometimes feel that as we’re moving through, you know, the visual world and particularly digital visual spaces, I feel really imbalanced because I think we entered into a world where, I mean, there is a constant adjudication that we’re making as to what is quote-unquote real and what is not. And both are lucid. And, you know, you’ve been speaking about the destructive possibilities of artificial intelligence for a few years now. And I know you raised the alarm about this in deep concern a few years ago as we were entering into the pandemic. And you were asking some pretty serious questions which now feel like everyone is talking. Right? Everyone’s talking about them, we’re in, we’re in the middle of this big conversation about the way A.I. platforms operate, and particularly the way that they use the literature and visual art, and the latest science is is, you know, a friend of mine who works in the field was recently telling me about ways in which, you know, we’re now capturing images that emerge in our brains because we can translate the electrical pulses of our neurons into images. Now, what happens when your lucid dreams get incorporated into the algorithm? I mean, there’s something going on at this moment that feels really unsteady.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Yeah. I will say as an autobiographical note, growing up in what is now considered Silicon Valley meant that I had a lot of early exposure to emerging technologies, a lot of early exposure to sort of like the Silicon Valley mindset. A lot of early contact with like the relationship between like neoliberalism, multiculturalism, progress and like tech evangelism. And as a young person, I was part of a program called Plugged In, which was basically supporting young people in my city. Low income students, students of color. And like understanding more about the Internet age. And so we were like on the Internet and like, I was coding at 11 and 12, we were making websites and doing design for local non-profits, and it was like a real thing. And so I remember at that young age, the thing that was so exciting about the Internet was like the mystery that you could click something and it could send you somewhere and you don’t know where you’re going. And there was a sense of like, unpredictability or like this sort of, like space of, like mystery and curiosity you could sort of dive into. And so I think that what’s interesting about this current period, at least for me, is that the things that I enjoy most about the Internet, the things that I enjoy most about life mystery, have been taken from us because of everything that I’m thinking can just be translated into a form that I have no reason to even engage with you. I have no reason to engage with the world. I have no reason to. I get up in the morning to think about how this is connected to this. The sort of like easy access to everything means that we don’t go through the learning that will be circuitous and send us off on a tangent that ultimately broadens our world. Right? And so the AI stuff was so interesting to me because I was engaged in these conversations with myself and with my siblings and being so interested in how fast everything was moving. But the critique wasn’t moving at the same pace as the development and release of the technology. And so I think that my sort of warning or anxiety about AI and machine learning always starts from the same place of interiority and surveillance. Because the thing that I always say about my work too, is that I’m taking whatever I can out of myself and offering it up. But that also means that I always keep something for myself too. I want to be able to return to something that only is for me. And I feel like what is happening now with machine learning and artificial intelligence is that we’re being asked to relinquish our full interiority, not because we’re building better relationships, not because this is going to open up some new peaceful landscape, but literally because it is a moneymaker. And so I think the relationship between capitalism, artificial intelligence and subjugation is too heavy for me to not say things about. And so I have spent the past couple of years learning literally, like, I don’t want to talk conceptually about this. I’m going to learn as much as I can. I did this short fellowship with Google where I learned a lot, and it was important for me to really be like, before I speak, do you know what you’re talking about? Before I critique, do you know what you’re talking about? And I’m like, yeah, I do know what I’m talking about. This is bad news, guys. Stop sending your photo to random people who are just going to use that in perpetuity. Like, it has never been beneficial to hand over this much interior dialog to anyone. And so I think that my interiority is what makes me human, is what creates my complexity, and for someone to ask that that becomes part of a data set in some way crushes me at like a political level and a spiritual level. And it makes me wonder then, what do people get up in the morning to do?

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK: Yeah.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Because the mystery has been solved for you. What are you doing on the planet?

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Kameelah, Tell me about a joy or a meanness that came as a recent unexpected visitor.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Yeah, I feel like in the spirit of generosity, I’ll share this too. In 2021, I filed for divorce, and I think that when I got married in 2017, divorce was never on my mind. And it was a rude. It was very rude. It was a very, I wouldn’t say it unexpected, that’s for another thing, but it was a rude entry point, a rude moment. But I think that without that moment, without making that decision, without following through, without doing all the paperwork, going to all the offices to do that, I would not have known that I could do hard and uncomfortable things. I think that for most of my life there have been hard and uncomfortable things. But this, as an adult, was sort of the hardest, uncomfortable thing that I had done because it was a moment where I was concerned about how it was being perceived. I was concerned about my flight, there were a bunch of things I was concerned about. But I learned that we leave things that no longer are serving our spirit. It was a rude awakening from a shadow figure of myself, reminding me to come back to myself and to make a house that could be filled with people who both deserve to be there and are a compliment and a blessing.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK:
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, thank you for being on This Being Human.

KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED:
Thank you so much.

ABDUL-REHMAN MALIK VOICEOVER:

Thank you for listening to This Being Human. You can check the show notes for links to Kameelah’s work. This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our Senior Producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hailey Choi. Our executive producers are Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Our associate audio editor is Cameron McIver. Original music by Boombox Sound. Shaghayegh Tajvidi is TVO’s Managing Editor of Digital Video and Podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.

This Being Human is generously supported by the Aga Khan Museum. Through the arts, the Aga Khan Museum sparks wonder, curiosity, and understanding of Muslim cultures and their connection with other cultures. The Museum wishes to thank The Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation for their generous support of This Being Human.