At Brooklyn Museum, alienation wins again

By Brooklyn Magazine Staff

Performance and visual artist Baseera Khan has been tapped to receive the Brooklyn Museum’s second-annual UOVO Prize awarded to emerging Brooklyn artists–perhaps the second-ever (or at certainly most recent) such award to be funded by a fancy storage facility. Khan, who identifies as a queer femme Muslim, is a conceptual performance and collage artist who uses her work and wit to explore what it is to navigate the world “as a feminist, and as a brown Indian-Pakistani-Afghani.”

In addition to a no-strings-attached $25,000 grant, Baseera will be given a solo show—her first—at the Brooklyn Museum and a commission for a 50 x 50-foot public art installation on the façade of Bushwick’s UOVO: BROOKLYN facility, which opened in February. (UOVO offers 150,000 square feet of climate-controlled fine art, fashion and collections storage.)

(Photo: Maridelis Morales Rosado)

“I am deeply moved that my first museum solo exhibition will happen in a space that provided me and others with so much comfort during the lockdown of Covid-19,” she said in a statement.

A 2018 artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Baseera held her first solo exhibition in New York the year before. It took its title “iamuslima” from a political/artistic stunt. She had Nike stitch the word “Muslima” on a pair of sneakers to protest the company’s refusal to allow the word “Islam” or “Muslim” on its customizable sneaker models. (Nike has since removed the words from its banned list of “content construed to incite violence.”)

“I collage distinct and often mutually exclusive cultural references to explore the conditions of alienation, displacement, assimilation, and fluidity,” she writes on her website.

Also, “alienation, displacement, assimilation, and fluidity” might as well be the keywords for 2020.