Baseera Khan at Moody Center for the Arts
Historical past has an extended custom of being recorded and handed down for generations through track and poetry. “Weight on Historical past,” Baseera Khan’s first solo exhibition in Houston, is a lyrical, psychedelic meditation on up to date popular culture, queerness, the immigrant creativeness, and the previous.
Probably the most placing and monumental items right here is Painful Arc (Shoulder-Excessive), 2022, a twelve-foot-eight-inch-high sculpture of an Islamic arch that, through Khan’s ingenious rendering, offers important perception into historic structure, sound, and subjectivity. These buildings possess an necessary acoustic objective inside Islamic constructing design: Their concavities are supposed to behave as resonators, magnifying and spreading sound waves. Supplies together with marble and ceramic tiles have incessantly been used for his or her outstanding sound-enhancing properties within the creation of those arches. But Khan’s piece is constituted of plywood and insulation foam, supplies that are inclined to soak up sound. This act of sonic subjugation reads as a playfully subversive gesture. Photographs of the artist’s personal physique and a standing microphone are carved into the work, humorously inscribing Khan’s (aesthetic) “voice” into its surfaces.
On a close-by wall are works from the sequence “Psychedelic Prayer Rugs,” 2017–18. These non secular objects are emblazoned with conventional Islamic, queer, and pop-cultural motifs. One of many rugs options an Urdu poem that reads: “The best to talk might be taken away, however not the proper to remain silent.” Sadly, this sense of quiet doesn’t play a significant function in Western political discourse; nonetheless, silence generally is a highly effective formal aspect in musical compositions and lyrical narratives. This stillness, nonetheless, doesn’t equal voicelessness, particularly in Khan’s Acoustic Sound Blankets, 2017–20. These sound-absorbing clothes with round gold-embroidered openings have been worn by the artist for varied dwell performances. Maybe these enigmatic, glamorous vestments have been designed to protect Khan from the skin world’s uglier forces, whereas permitting some type of essential bodily connection to these nearest and dearest to them.
— Salome Kokoladze
