Join us for the In the Studio artist talk series, spotlighting artists and bringing them into dialogue with our audiences. This special talk features New York based artist Baseera Khan and marks the first time they will be in conversation about their work in London. Working across painting, sculpture, installation and performance, Khan poetically navigates issues around cultural identities, gender and desire.

Khan is interested in exploring how the economies of materials and colour intersect with labour, family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being. Khan is the custodian of their father's fragmented archive of newspaper clippings, diplomas, political cartoons, currency transfers, gold rates, and prayer times. His stories, full of Kashmiri gardens and the effects of The Partition, become unreliable truths, influencing Khan's concepts of culture, religion, and family. These unreliable memories form the basis of Khan's artistic practice.

Khan will discuss their new solo show Pocket Diary at Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (7 March - 17 April). The exhibition includes shapes and symbols that repeat throughout their work including chandeliers and the ongoing performance piece Acoustic Sound Blanket. These feature alongside Red Paintings, a new series inspired by the colour red, the first colour a baby sees and The Liberator, a sculpture merging an 18th-century sculpture of Naro Dakini, a Tibetan Buddhist deity housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, with Khan's own body and Backdrops. Wall mounted sculptures depicting Khan’s flat in Crown Heights also highlight her use of photography and installation. Through their practice, Khan engages with the identity, cultural and economic value of materials, prioritising this over art historical genres.
  
“The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try not to reinstate these colonial labels in my work, instead try to emancipate them by my use of form and color, performance - I abstract identity with multiple ways of working. My life's work is dedicated to the development of my own legacy, on my own terms, with the use of architecture, fashion, painting, photography, textiles, and music, parody, sculpture, and performance, I manifest my femme native-born Muslim American experience.”

The evening will include an artist presentation, talk and Q+A.