What Is the Cost of Inclusion? Dina Ramadan Reviews Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers
Baseera Khan, Privacy Control at BRIC Arts Media Brooklyn, live performance and climb, October 9, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist
As museums and exhibition spaces make efforts to showcase more diverse artwork and perspectives, in her review of Baseera Khan’s I Am an Archive for Art Papers, Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, considers the cost for the artist. Noting Khan’s usage of collage and texture, Ramadan calls the exhibition “energetic and ambitious,” with many pieces serving as “a deliberate reflection on capitalist economies of extraction and imperialist trade routes that continually ravage the Middle East and South Asia.” Larger questions arise when it comes to representation and its relation to the labor of artists of color, however. In attempting to to reeducate its audience to “the fundamentals of Islam,” the exhibition “encourag[es] an anthropological approach to the work,” Ramadan writes. “Ultimately, I Am an Archive raises urgent questions about the kind of ‘educational’ labor art institutions expect artists of color to perform in return for their inclusion.”
Post Date: 04-19-2022
Post Date: 04-19-2022