Kameelah Janan Rasheed

In 1998, my family was displaced, and we became homeless. For ten years, our bodies and memories were fragmented across shelters and the homes of relatives. As an artist-archivist, my work explores memory, discursive regimes, historiography, and forms of labor through archival installations that map conversations between traces and fragments such as found material culture, ephemeral historical residue, personal objects, self-authored books, and original photography. I excavate objects from a range of sources including eBay, flea markets, institutional archives, and dumpsters. I displace these objects from their original context in order to reorganize them into new transhistorical contexts to reveal new narrative possibilities. These excavated objects operate as ghosts—the past showing up in the present, refusing to leave and begging for another temporal stage on which to perform. Haunted by these displaced objects, I invite them into installation spaces to listen for the echoes.