Baseera Khan, Braidrage, 2017–ongoing, Indoor rock-climbing wall made from 99 unique poured dyed resin casts of the corners of the artist’s body, embedded with wearable Cuban chains, hair, and hypothermia blankets, Dimensions variable, Collection of the artist, Installation view at the University of Albany, Photo by Ariana Sarwari, © Baseera Khan
Baseera Khan is one of eleven artists whose work will be presented in NOMA’s exhibition Mending the Sky, on view from October 9, 2020, through January 31, 2021. Khan’s video-performance work, titled Braidrage, explores the experience of overcoming trauma, based around a rock-climbing wall made from resin casts of parts of Khan’s body that the artist climbs.
Khan was among eight arts-related professionals profiled in a Labor Day weekend feature from the The New York Times written by Alisha Hardisani Gupta. An excerpt follows:
The artist Baseera Khan decided to film a cooking series for Instagram called “Apocalypse Cooking” in the days after New York began sheltering in place.
The videos were decidedly tongue-in-cheek, almost parodying Instagram as a medium (“look at all my toilet paper,” “I still have cute nails”), that provided viewers with easy-to-follow recipes.
“‘You don’t need fancy things to make fancy food’ was the theme,” Khan said in a recent interview.
On March 26, Khan, who uses the pronoun “they,” did a live cooking session on BRIC Brooklyn’s Instagram page. And then, that day, Khan started feeling the symptoms of Covid-19. Immediately after filming for BRIC, they started getting the chills.
“So April was dark for me,” Khan said, and much of their life came to a halt.
▶ Read the entire feature from The New York Times
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