Lower the pitch of your suffering, tell your struggle with triumphant humour
'Kameelah Janan Rasheed deliver(s) public messages like bee stings.' LOUIS BURY, HYPERALLERGIC
Presented by In Between Time with Arnolfini as part of the In Between Time Summit and the Still I Rise expanded programme.
How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) is a series of large-scale text works exhibited outside Arnolfini in central Bristol to invoke and satirize traditional etiquette guides.
Created in response to the escalating violence against Black people across the United States, the work examines the expectations placed on these communities to police their reactions while maintaining restraint and civility. More broadly, the work asks its viewers to consider how such self-monitoring of everything from emotional expression to physical movement is used as a tool to perpetuate oppressive systems.
In Bristol, How To Suffer Politely asks viewers to scrutinize our own city’s history of violence and oppression towards its Black communities that continues to this day.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed will also be connecting with communities around Bristol in the week leading up to the Summit. Developing texts that shout out what they stand for, using the simple power of words to make incisive interventions onto the city’s streets. You can also catch Kameelah during Day 1 & 2 of the Summit, leading the workshop Language and Power.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) is a learner and interdisciplinary artist who seeks to make her thinking (somewhat) visible through projects and experiments. This includes sprawling xerox-based “architecturally-scaled collages” (Frieze Magazine, Winter 2018), publications, large-scale text banner installations, digital archives, lecture performances, library interventions, stand up comedy, and other forms yet to be determined. With an interest in experimental poetry, intertextuality, literacy, archiving, knowledge production, and ecology, her practice explores the processes of mistranslation / misreading / mispronunciation, and the instability of meaning.
