NOME is pleased to announce two parallel solo exhibitions with the American artists Dread Scott and Kameelah Janan Rasheed. These are the first exhibitions in the gallery’s Dialogue series, which pairs artists working across different generations and media who share common research interests and conceptual concerns in order to explore the resonances, divergences, and complexities of their respective practices.

Dread Scott is a visual artist who makes revolutionary art to propel history forward. Whether working in performance, installation, video, photography, printmaking, or painting, his work evinces a dedication to significant social questions and the desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries. Liberation From the Past will be Scott’s first solo exhibition with NOME, as well as his premiere solo exhibition in Germany. The exhibition brings together works from the past five years, including photography, flags, letterpress prints, and a conceptual NFT project.

In 2019, Dread Scott undertook the Slave Rebellion Reenactment. This socially-engaged project re-enacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history as a means to generate ideas and images of self-liberated Black people, excavating a hidden and buried history about freedom and emancipation—about people with a bold vision who tried to overthrow a system of enslavement. Scott’s art often looks at how the past sets the stage for the present but also exists in the present in new form. Made in the wake of a violent police shooting, the banner A Man Was Lynched by the Police Yesterday updates the iconic flag hung by the NAACP outside of their national headquarters to protest a lynching that took place in the 1920s. An ongoing series begun in 2018, Scott’s series of letterpress prints entitled Statements draw upon the eye-popping colors and typography of the canonical Colby posters used to advertise concerts, films, and performances, transforming them into agitational placards that advocate for racial and social justice. The exhibition will also include Dread Scott’s innovative, medium-reflexive NFT White Male for Sale, which features a one-minute video loop of a non-descript white man standing on an auction block in the middle of a predominantly Black Brooklyn neighborhood. “The term fungible resonated differently for me due to its use by scholars of the history of slavery,” Scott explains, “People are inherently non-fungible. But as slavery became an integral part of developing capitalism, enslavers sought to make people fungible.”

Dread Scott (b.1965, Chicago) lives and works in New York City. His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; San Francisco; Hamburger Kunsthalle; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Scott received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. In 2019, he was the Open Society Foundation’s Soros Equality Fellow and has received the United States Artists Fellowship as well as a Creative Capital Grant. The New York Times selected his art as one of “The 25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II” in 2020.

In her text-based installations, prints, publications, and videos, Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished and uncontained. For Rasheed, the acts of reading and writing are not passive experiences and thereby her work engages an understanding of text as an unfixed, living organism that desires iteration and intervention. In her second exhibition with NOME, entitled in the meanwhile of examines this intervening period of time—the time before something else happens.

in the meanwhile of is an “open set where shit happen[ed] over time.”

Kameelah Janan Rasheed writes:
OFTENTIMES, people ask me “what does it mean?” And I usually respond, “I do not know…yet.”
I am interested in the Black opacity and illegibility, not as performative obfuscation, but as an assertion of a sacred right and responsibility to always be in the process of becoming, on the move – to be a learner – to be unfixed, wayward as Saidiya Hartman reminds us – “unregulated movement…black locomotion…adrift, rambling, roving, cruising, strolling, seeking.” And yes, the work deeply engages with countersurveillance – and it is not just about how we escape the grasp of the state, but countersurveillance also as a language to abolish the individual impulse to surveil each stage of making to extract immediate knowledge or utility.
I do not know, yet what the work means. I can offer only titles. I am no longer running to catch up with myself. I go at my own pace. I like what Pope.L says in his 2017 text, Proto-Skin Set: “Protos and SS proper are a set of things together conceptually but separated by time; a dynamic open set where shit happens over time.”

The exhibition features a new series of prints entitled God did not glitch, but did they did move the sun, the silent video Footsteps ascend quickly, and a series of aquatints that incorporates abstract shapes, markings, and gestures bordering on visual glossolalia—the religious phenomenon of speaking in tongues, and the site-specific work Good Morning. Has your body reached a consensus? that is a series of asemic writing created immediately after awakening from lucid dreams .

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. In 2022, she received her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein Hannover. She recently participated in the Athens Biennale and Prospect New Orleans. Rasheed has previously exhibited her work at the Glasgow International; Kunsthalle Wien; Future Generation Exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale; the Brooklyn Museum; The New Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Brooklyn Public Library, among others. Rasheed received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Creative Capital Grant.