NEW YORK, NY.- UOVO has unveiled a new public art mural by Baseera Khan, recipient of the Brooklyn Museum’s second annual UOVO Prize, on the façade of its Brooklyn facility in Bushwick. Commissioned on the occasion of the UOVO Prize, the 50x50-foot installation features a large-scale image of Khan performing Braidrage (2017-ongoing), their best known, multi-disciplinary work bridging sculpture, video, and performance. The mural unveiling coincides with the announcement of Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, to be presented by the Brooklyn Museum this fall as part of the UOVO Prize. Curated by Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the exhibition will be on view October 1, 2021-July 10, 2022. Khan’s UOVO Brooklyn mural is on view to the public now through mid-2022.
Braidrage, as visualized in the UOVO mural, features the artist climbing a wall of 99 resin casts of their own body, using the techniques of indoor rock climbing as a metaphor for overcoming personal and colonial traumas with rage and strength. The body forms are embedded with fragments of hypothermia blankets, gold and silver chains, and synthetic and real hair imported from India, signifying internalized trauma in a field of collective pain experienced by women of color globally. The artist is captured from behind in a moment of active ascent, their identity and gender obscured. As they climb, their hands and feet mark the white wall with smudges of charcoal, transforming the act of climbing-as-art into a form of drawing-in-space. As a queer femme Muslim, Khan’s mural brings their varied identities and experiences, not often seen in media or art, into the space of the street and at an undeniable scale.
Braidraige is an integral part of Khan’s practice whereby the artist unpacks mechanisms of othering, surveillance, cultural exploitation, anti-blackness, and xenophobia within our public and private spaces and proposes avenues for protection and liberation. Khan’s solo exhibition, I Am an Archive, at the Brooklyn Museum this fall will feature six new sculptures, installations, and collages in conversation with key works made since 2017.
“Seeing Baseera Khan’s important Braidrage performance at this scale is stunning,” Carmen Hermo, Associate Curator, Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, remarked. “The mural brings the artist’s tenacious, layered practice into the neighborhood, while also acting as a kind of fierce, femme response to the advertising and public art landscape of the city at large.”
UOVO Founder and Co-Chairman, Steven Guttman, said of the mural: “We are honored to have Baseera Khan’s conceptually rich and visually stunning work on display at our Brooklyn facility as part of the UOVO Prize. Khan’s inclusion continues the tradition of the UOVO Prize, inaugurated last year, to support an emerging Brooklyn-based artist and to engage our local community. We are thrilled that Baseera Khan was chosen as the second annual UOVO Prize winner, and we look forward to their solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum later this year.”
The UOVO Prize is an annual award given by the Brooklyn Museum to an emerging artist in Brooklyn. The winner receives a public art installation at UOVO’s Brooklyn facility, a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, and a $25,000 unrestricted cash grant. As part of UOVO’s extensive commitment to the communities in which it operates, the UOVO Prize aims to engage the Bushwick community and bring art to the public in a meaningful and sustained manner. Now in its second year, the Prize is one of many ways in which UOVO supports local artists and institutions.
