Mar 15 2025

Black Earth Study Club: Speculative Diagramming Workshop with Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Sat | 2PM

SI is pleased to present a workshop led by artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed. This workshop is part of the Black Earth Study Club, a series of transdisciplinary programs informed by Nolan Oswald Dennis’s exhibition, overturns, which weaves together artistic, scientific, and philosophical approaches to explore the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization.

Proceeding from the previous program, which deals with themes of alternative pedagogy and knowledge production, Rasheed’s workshop explores the politics and poetics of knowledge management systems, departing from what Dennis identifies as the “paradoxical impulse” to simplify. The afternoon will begin with a performance-lecture that draws on various sources, from the writings of Octavia Butler, Édouard Glissant, Katherine McKittrick, and Aimé Césaire, to concepts from quantum mechanics and astrophysics, and the artist’s personal experiences. This will be followed by a collaborative session on speculative diagramming: participants will hand-code hypertextual relationships and collectively work together to build a physical and embodied diagram.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Black Earth Study Club is organized by KJ Abudu, Assistant Curator, Public Programs and Residencies.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. She creates sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” installations; public installations; publications; prints; performances; performance scores; poems; video; and other forms yet to be determined. Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 High Desert Test Sites Fellowship at Joshua Tree; 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of several artists’ books, some of which include: rub, lick, drink, eat (REDCAT and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext (Emerson College and Rasheed’s publishing project, Scratch Disks Full, 2024); in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); and i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.

Image: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Casual Expectations of Plot, 2020.