Viewing Baseera Khan at Niru Ratnam

Baseera Khan is the New York-based multimedia artist who has made a name in the US for paintings, sculptures, installations and performance works that draw on their South Asian heritage and consider the implicit, oft invisible, intersections between labour, family, religion and power. Khan has exhibited at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, High Line, New York and the Brooklyn Museum, among others — but this is set to be the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK.

A group of new chromatic paintings, Red Paintings, are Khan’s reworking of the notes and images contained in a pocket notebook Khan’s father carried, in which he noted births and deaths and important events. This archive of newspaper clippings, certificates, political cartoons, currency transfers and prayer times are the basis for Khan’s understanding of their identity, and relationship to the world – memory, myth and fact merged as one.

Elsewhere, Khan creates arresting sculptures, also in bold red, inspired by deities and Khan’s own body, once again blurring the boundaries between self and the outside world, between the individual and collective, past and present. A second gallery continues this theme, with chandeliers by Khan animating the room like glittering disco balls.