Kameelah Janan Rasheed, (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, California, USA; lives and works Los Angeles and Brooklyn, USA)
Air Shaft Study I–III (2023)

Air Shaft Study I–III comprises three monumental text-based installations. The series takes inspiration from Duke Ellington’s 1944 jazz composition Harlem Air Shaft, in which the composer describes the narrow spaces between Harlem buildings as sites of sensory amplification filled with voices, smells, and life —“You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. […] An air shaft has got every contrast.” For Rasheed, the air shaft becomes an architectural and linguistic metaphor where meaning is withheld, fragmented, and transformed. Each banner displays a repeated sentence that shifts meaning through a single changing word, playing on interpretative ambiguity. Like the air shaft, Rasheed’s work amplifies what lies nearby—inviting a reflection on the legibility of absence and saturation.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose expansive practice explores the poetics and politics of knowledge production, Black epistemologies, and the possibilities of language. Describing herself as a “learner,” Rasheed engages with text across various mediums to examine how meaning is constructed, interpreted, and disseminated. For Rasheed, reading and writing are not passive acts but generative processes—ways of thinking, questioning, and becoming. This perspective informs her understanding of text as a mutable, living organism that resists fixity and invites constant iteration and intervention. Her practice unfolds across an ecosystem of provisional projects and experiments: large-scale installations, lecture performances, publications, sound works, library interventions, xeroxed collages, and other forms yet to be determined.

Select solo exhibitions include REDCAT, Los Angeles (2024); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2023); and Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover (2022). Select group exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2025–2026); The Kitchen, New York (2025); New Museum, New York (2018); and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2019, 2016). Rasheed is a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts (2021) and the recipient of a VIA Grant (2025).

NOME is a contemporary art gallery based in Berlin, founded by Luca Barbeni in 2015. Positioned at the intersection of art, technology, and politics, the gallery presents a program that critically examines contemporary and historical narratives—particularly those shaped by systems of power, representation, and technological influence.
NOME showcases a diverse roster of international emergent and mid-career artists whose work addresses urgent global issues, from surveillance and data privacy to ethnographic explorations of Indigenous and Black counter-narratives, across a range of media including digital art, performance, and time-based practices.