Textile (Textile)

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.

Textile (Textile)

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 misunderstood 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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Black Ocean by Liu Yujia portrays a desert landscape in a state of both destruction and construction, revealing the desert’s simultaneous fragility and indestructibility. The structure of the storytelling of this film was inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities (1972). Several chapters from the book are interwoven in the film incorporating the discussions of cities and landscapes narrated by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in the novel.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

PANGKIS by Yee I-Lann is a looped video performance. The work is named after the triumphant warrior cry, an animistic guttural call, which punctuates the traditional Dusun Sumazau dance. For this work, the artist collaborated with Tagaps Dance Theatre, a group of young dancers whose practice merges traditional and contemporary styles.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The essay film How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi takes us into an indigenous village of the Jrai people in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, in Gia Lai province. It begins with sound – perhaps a hammer, or a gong – the lack of image making its identification difficult. A landscape emerges of an open field where a farmer tends his grazing cow herd.