Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans in India, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly coloured symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a brief passage from an Arabic poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. Encouraged by Khan to take their shoes off and interact with the rugs, viewers participate in a decolonizing process as they meditate on their poetic allusions or perform the traditional salat, the daily prayers that constitute one of the five pillars of Islam, the others being faith, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage to Mecca. Khan’s Act Up rug is more somber, an excerpt from a poem set against a black backdrop and bordered in gold.
Designed by the artist and fabricated in collaboration with Kashmiri artisans, Baseera Khan’s Psychedelic Prayer Rugs combine visual iconography traditional to Islam, such as the crescent moon and lunar calendar, with brightly colored symbols of personal significance to the artist: a pair of embroidered sneakers, a fragment of an Urdu poem, and the Purple Heart medal. Visually seductive yet charged with political and symbolic associations, the rugs bridge elements of American popular culture with aspects of Islamic worship that may be poorly understood in contemporary secular contexts. In past installations of this work, Khan made space for viewers to engage with the rugs, to perform the traditional salat, the daily ritual prayers of Islam, or to commune through its tactile and spiritual conditions.
Khan’s Act Up rug weaves political and queer alliances with spiritual practice. Underneath a pyramidal rendition of the pink triangle symbol associated with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), the direct action advocacy group founded to end the ongoing AIDS epidemic, is a fragment of an Urdu poem that reads: “The right to speak can be taken away, but not the right to stay silent.” The pink triangle, first used in the Holocaust, and reclaimed by activists in the continued struggle of LGBTQ+ folks, is synonymous with ACT UP's activism. By making space to contemplate the power and agency of silence, Khan implicitly connects the slogan SILENCE=DEATH of AIDS activism popularized by ACT UP to other political voices, such as Kashmiri autonomy, the region where Khan has worked with artisans to produce the rugs.
