Baseera Khan, Film Area Guided Hands, 2020; Signed and Numbered Limited Edition Print on Anodized Aluminum

Baseera Khan is a New York based conceptual artist who uses multiple mediums to visualize patterns and repetitions of exile and kinship shaped by economic, social, and political changes in local and global environments, with special interests in decolonization processes. Their practice navigates the political circumstances of their identity as a self-identified queer femme Muslim and addresses issues of surveillance, otherness, and the body through sculpture, video, collage, performance, and Islamic cultural and religious ephemera. 

Film Area Guided Hands is one of Baseera Khan’s most recent archive collages in which Khan reveals themself to the viewer by depicting the artist’s own hands — bejeweled with rings and perfectly manicured black nails — as has been done in past photo collages. 

“I collage distinct and often mutually exclusive cultural references to explore the conditions of alienation, displacement, assimilation, and fluidity….To think of my work as layers that fit beside, ontop, in between, and underneath gives me room to create numerous projects based in my personal psyche living within realms of surveillance and otherness, in suspension, between exile and kinship….I am making my own legacy, a legacy of aesthetic concealment, with the use of fashion, photography, textiles and music, sculpture and performance, I manifest my native-born femme Muslim American experience.”

Baseera Khan was recently awarded Brooklyn Museum's second annual UOVO Prize that comes with a solo exhibition in 2021 and a $25,000 award.