Act Up (Psychedelic Prayer Rugs)
2017 - Textile (Textile)
48 x 30 inches
Baseera Khan
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Khan’s Act Up rug is more somber, an excerpt from a poem set against a black backdrop and bordered in gold.
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly colored symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. In past installations of this work, Khan made space for viewers to engage with the rugs, to perform the traditional salat, the daily ritual prayers of Islam, or to commune through its tactile and spiritual conditions. Khan’s Act Up rug weaves political and queer alliances with spiritual practice. Underneath a pyramidal rendition of the pink triangle symbol associated with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the direct action advocacy group founded to end the ongoing AIDS epidemic, is a fragment of an Urdu poem that reads: “The right to speak can be taken away, but not the right to stay silent.” The pink triangle, first used in the Holocaust, and reclaimed by activists in the continued struggle of LGBTQ+ folks, is synonymous with ACT UP’s activism. By making space to contemplate the power and agency of silence, Khan implicitly connects the slogan SILENCE=DEATH of AIDS activism popularized by ACT UP to other political voices, such as Kashmiri autonomy, the region where Khan has worked with artisans to produce the rugs.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Weekly Picks: Malaysia (23 July – 29 July 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Malaysia July 23, 2018 Caravaggio Art Talk 3, at Balai Seni Negara, 25 July, 11am In conjunction with the Caravaggio Opera Omnia exhibition, art expert Sabiana Paoli will be providing audience members insights to Caravaggio’s most significant works made in Rome, Malta, Naples and Sicily...
© » FAD MAGAZINE
Jesse Darling Takes 2023 Turner Prize for Exposing Decay in 'Great' Britain - FAD Magazine Skip to content By Mark Westall • 6 December 2023 Share — Jesse Darling wins Turner Prize 2023, as we called it back in September ( Who should win the Turner Prize 2023 ), the winner of the £25,000 prize was announced last night at a ceremony presented by Tinie Tempah at Eastbourne’s Winter Garden, adjacent to Towner Eastbourne, the hosts of this year’s prize...
© » HYPERALLERGIC
Artist Jesse Darling Wins Tate Britain's Turner Prize Skip to content Jesse Darling at the Turner Prize 2023 award ceremony at Towner Eastbourne (photo by Victor Frankowski/Hello Content; all images courtesy Tate) Jesse Darling has won this year’s Turner Prize , given annually to a British visual artist by the Tate museums...
© » KADIST
Laura Gannon
2017The impressionistic surface of Wild Money (2017) recalls the 1950s paintings of Philip Guston...
© » KADIST
Nidhal Chamekh
2016Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...
© » KADIST
Motoyuki Daifu
2010Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama...
© » KADIST
Shahryar Nashat
2015Employing both the High Modernist technique of abstraction and monochronism, as in the work of Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein, and bodily states of fetishization, Yea High (sweetpreparator) reworks the art historical canon of movement and the body to consider flesh as a physical construction of man-made matter...
© » KADIST
Olga Grotova
2022Our Grandmothers’ Gardens by Olga Grotova is based on the history of Soviet allotment gardens, which were small plots of land distributed amongst the families of factory workers to compensate for poor food supply in a country that was over-producing weapons...