The High Line

Join us for an in-depth conversation between artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Taylor Zakarin, Associate Curator of High Line Art, as they discuss Rasheed’s High Line Channel exhibition, which screens from 12 – 8pm daily on the High Line at 14th Street.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her expansive practice is anchored by a focus on, and an effort to unlearn, preconceived notions of Blackness, language, and dominant cultural narratives. Rasheed employs a zine-like cut-and-paste aesthetic to combine fragments of words, images, archival footage, her own voice, and her own visage throughout her work. Her videos, installations, publications, and performances are characterized by annotations, redactions, cut-outs, glyphs, and marks. By altering and appropriating texts, she both formally and conceptually articulates a need to “rip it up,” presenting alternative stories told by traditionally marginalized voices. Through her work, Rasheed meticulously builds a visual language that presents identity as expansive, nuanced, and as the product of a fluid, non-linear process.

For her High Line Channel exhibition, Rasheed presents two recent video works, Keeping Count, annotated (2021–23) and disorganize the spirit, i (2025). Both works are a pulsing, grainy collage of archival footage, hand animation, xeroxed images, and fragments of sentences and diagrams. Errant, flickering images and text fill and then evacuate the frame. Keeping Count, annotated interrogates the certainty and purported objectivity of numbers and formulas, juxtaposing them with poetic associations, digital noise, and spiritual abstraction. Initially created as a video titled Keeping Count, the later annotated version functions as a dialogue, with the artist adding a layer of marginalia, drawings, and animated text onto her own earlier work, doubling its runtime and making it a “living document.” In doing so, Rasheed resists finite certainty, and instead embraces the incalculable, the unfinished, and the illegible. Disorganize the spirit, i similarly looks to liberate the unquantifiable. The work considers how information, identity, and experiences are often abbreviated or contained by societal expectations. Rasheed draws a critical parallel between this and data compression—a process in data and computing systems that collapses and simplifies information. In response, disorganize the spirit, i proposes an “embrace of Black excess and expansion,” resisting expectations to contain and regulate emotion, presence, cognition, and sensory input.