Calvin Warren calls it an 'ontological equation'/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries

2019 - Photography (Photography)
152 x 114 cm

Calvin Warren calls it an ‘ontological equation’/or methods of estimating the odds to rise in the coming centuries by Kameelah Janan Rasheed is part of A Casual Mathematics , a series of interpretive art diagrams, which revisit W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic data portraits in The Exhibit of American Negroes . This was a landmark exhibit within the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris that demonstrated the progress of Black Americans through the visual display of quantitative sociological information. Collectively, the series looks at how the language of statistics and demographic representation are used to narrate the story of both Black liberation, and struggle. According to the artist, “A Casual Mathematics is about the potentials and pitfalls of mathematical language to articulate a vast and non-centralized history (and future) of Black folks” and “the failure of all language to do work beyond approximations.” This work was created in 2019, or the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony. During this alternative “birth year” (1619, not 1776) of the American project, Rasheed strikes a balance between two opposing records as the consequences of a nation imperilled by the legacy of slavery is set against Black contributions to that same society. This work asks us to take stock of these accounts by alluding to a poetic, if not cryptic, or even elusive hidden formula in which a peoples’ advancement can be calculated by solving for missing (perhaps past) variables.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a radical self-publisher, and pamphleteer based in Brooklyn. Through large-scale banners in public space, to lecture performances, and Xeroxed “collages”, Rasheed investigates the construction of Blackness through intertextual compositions that speak to the need to rip it up – be it American history, or class structure – and start again. Her work is characterized by a zine-like cut and paste aesthetic in which the artist alters or appropriates reference and textbooks to upend, if not “unlearn” dominant cultural narratives, particularly those which reinforce white supremacy Rasheed is one of the leading explorers searching for new forms of representation that counter the cannon by articulating, both formally and methodologically, how identity is not a fixed essential quality, but is instead the product of a fluid non-linear process. Kameelah is committed to developing a visual language for this important scholarship – which is aimed not only at unlearning biased tales, but is also focused on listening to alternative stories, told by other, traditionally marginalized voices, so as to learn more about the world.