Entering Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s “Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985” is like stepping into a deconstructed essay in three dimensions. The site-specific exhibition at 鶹ý’s Benton Museum of Art evidences a volatile intellectual universe. Faced with a “constellation of fragmented texts,” the viewer must replicate the role of scholar and analyst. There is no single way, if there exists any way at all, to read the dark stars of symbols, ciphers, diagrams, English letters and Arabic characters. Everything is black-and-white, yet anything but binary, opening onto multiplicities of history, technology, and knowledge.
Rasheed, a Pomona alum, comes full circle in this exhibition. Where she formally started her intellectual journey, she now investigates knowledge itself — and holds it suspect. Her work engages scholars like Ashon Crawley and Saidiya Hartman in challenging ideals of certainty, completion, and comprehensiveness. In its place, she proposes a poetics of the unfinished.
“Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985” is an exhibition that refuses orientation. Instead, it invites an off-kilter engagement with space. Materials placed at different heights and in corners require viewers to manipulate their bodies for clarity. The very museum space is reframed. Glossy paper voids appear like little black holes drilled into the white cube’s very 1 walls. Snippets of text taped next to or over larger works hover off the wall. They act as captions in motion — incomplete and in flight.
In the one-room exhibition, a video dominates the back wall: it declares, “We speculate everyone will be saved through the algebra.” Assembled from hand-painted 35mm film and archival footage, it splices together the likes of technical training films such as “Computer Calculator for Math and Science (Hewlett-Packard, 1970s)” and The X-Files trailer. The truth is in the balance, as Rasheeds co-opts the coldly ceremonial language of academic, governmental, and scientific spaces to undercut assumptions about authority and objectivity.
Under the screen is a glass-framed collage of Xerox-based prints, mirroring the textual sprawl on the walls. It also offers a down-up view of the video in its inky reflection, as do other reflective surfaces in the space. These black mirrors, returning the viewer’s own likeness, involves and implicates them in the vexed process of meaning-making.
Repeatedly, Rasheed draws attention to the material textures of machines and the ghosts inside them. Smears, splotches, and other misprints suggest human contingency at work. Hazily photographed hands with elongated and multiplied fingers invoke genetic glitches. Dark presences proliferate. Read in the context of COVID-19 and as a racialized critique in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the exhibition asks who counts as maker of knowledge — and who is discounted and violently devalued.
1985 is Rasheed’s year of birth. The spiritual quest of “Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985” returns to fundamental questions of truth, faith, and origin. Through its rituals of repetition, anxious and unruly, it thrums up a disruptive, generative noise: in Rasheed’s words, a “manifesto, with orgasmic haunting.”
Works Cited: “Worshipping at the Altar of Certainty: 1985.” 24 Aug.-18 Dec. 2022, Benton Museum of Art, Claremont.
Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu
Dr. Bohn-Spector and Dr. Sachs Collopy
CLST 408.1 Curating Art and Science
24 October 2022