Baseera Khan: InSearches: Hindu Kush

Baseera Khan makes paintings on paper, video animations and installations about, among other things, internationalism. Born and raised in a suburb of Dallas, Texas to Muslim-Indian immigrants, Khan’s experiences of India are either as a visitor or as an observer of the immigrant community in which she was raised. Her exploration of cultural hybridization, rooted in a second-generation immigrant experience, touches on themes of alienation, integration, assimilation and identity in flux.

Landscape is prominent in her work, but rather than defining a place or time, the ambiguous “border land” settings evoke dislocation, crossings and transitions. The characters populating these in-between spaces – such as cricket players and anthropomorphized camels or monkeys – represent states of being or stereotypical roles.

Influenced by pop culture, Western and South Asian aesthetic traditions and cinema, Khan’s work is the product of a keen observer existing between cultures, appropriating, editing and collaging in an effort to illuminate identity in an increasingly complex international culture.

In her first solo exhibition, Khan presents paintings in which her alter ego, Saag Paneer, navigates through various allegorical landscapes. She will also exhibit a new animation, “Looking With Your Eyes Closed.”