The Hollow was Electric: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Asiya Wadud, Serubiri Moses, and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

Join us for The Hollow was Electric, an afternoon of readings featuring Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Asiya Wadud, Serubiri Moses, and Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves.

This is the finale to a series of programs at CARA inviting artists, writers, scholars, and thinkers to present their work, in dialogue with the themes found across Neo Muyanga’s A Mass of Cyborgs. Titled after a quote from Wadud’s poetry collection, No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat, 2021) the works by these four artists and writers are woven together by themes of embodiments, improvisation, sonic and somatic knowledges, practices of imperfect archiving, and indexing what the water holds.

About the Readers

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/they), grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. They are a recipient of a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, a 2022 Creative Capital Award, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the author of three artist’s books: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019), No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019), and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer. They are an adjunct instructor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a Critic at Yale School of Art, Sculpture, and a Mentor-in-Residence with NEW Inc. Rasheed is represented by NOME Gallery in Berlin, Germany.

Asiya Wadud is the author of several poetry collections, most recently No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her recent work appears in e-flux journal, BOMB Magazine, Triple Canopy, POETRY and elsewhere. Asiya’s work has been supported by the Foundation Jan Michalski, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Finnish Cultural Institute of New York, Rosendal Theater Norway, and Kunstenfestivaldesarts among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and Columbia University.

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and author based in New York City. He currently serves as faculty in Art History at Hunter College, and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He previously held positions at New York University and the New Centre for Research and Practice, and delivered lectures at Williams College, Yale University, University of Pittsburgh, The New School, and basis voor aktuelle kunst (NL), and University of the Arts Helsinki (FL). As a curator, he has organized exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1, Long Island City; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and the Hessel Museum, Bard College, NY. He previously held a research fellowship at the University of Bayreuth. He received his MA in Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and is an alumni of the Àsìkò International Art Programme (CCA Lagos). He serves on the editorial team of e-flux journal.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves is an artist guided by geographillia, embodied schematic diagrammatic metaphysics, network science, ethnobotany, conceptual lyric sculpturity, comprehensive divergent cognitive convergence, and the granular analytics of poetic inquiry. Supporters include Rauschenberg Residency, Artists Space, Issue Project Room, Montez Press at Matthew NYC, The Poetry Project, 4 Columns, Hyperallergic, About Place Journal, Belladonna*, Kore Press, Ugly Duckling Presse, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School, Princeton University, MoMA, Karma, and Brown University.

Opening image by Asiya Wadud, Chorus Part 2, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.