Nolan Oswald Dennis

Interview by Kameelah Janan Rasheed

“In order to do what they need to do, they need to stop doing what they are doing,” Nolan Oswald Dennis declares during our interview this summer. Referring to precovery and the adjacent methods astronomers use to sift through presumed noise and detritus, Dennis repeatedly redirects our attention from the art object to the latent and explicit methods we use to make art itself. In a 1992 conversation with Vietnamese writer and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh–ha, the interviewer asks Minh-ha to return to her 1982 film Reassemblage, shot in Senegal among the Sereer people. Her first film, a voice-over states: “I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby.” In this 1992 interview, Minh-ha explains this as a form of speaking that “reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it.” And so, I hesitate to render a summary of Nolan Oswald Dennis’s practice and this interview itself. Instead, I want to speak nearby without the compulsion to capture and compress. In doing so, I am at a loss: in this thicket of metadiscourse about the interview genre, there are things I want to preemptively reveal about our sprawling encounter. However, I am more committed to the reader stumbling upon moments as they read and reread this conversation. In the spirit of the “nearby” rather than the “about,” this interview can function as a catalog of stated and unstated associations. I think about Pope. L’s 2023 video interview for his show Hospital in London. In describing what he wants people to do with and inside the work, he says, “I left a lot of holes in this show, and I want you to fill in these holes with your experience.” The holes, much like in his 2002 publication Hole Theory, function as openings, invitations, and apertures. And we are invited elsewhere: tunnels and trapdoors that shuttle you beyond and beneath the conversation itself. So maybe this interview is less of a statement than a series of invitations to come closer—to yourself, to your methods, to the routinized ways of being that hold us steady—at a time when [Édouard] Glissant’s invitation to tremble is most needed.

I. Para, Parasite

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (KJR): I am curious about your insistence that you are a paradisciplinary artist. I've seen a lot of artists refer to themselves as anti-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and undisciplinary. However, para has a different inflection. Could you talk a little bit about what this self-designation does for your practice?

Nolan Oswald Dennis (NOD): The framing of your question is interesting because it offers a kind of grounding in terms like interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary. However, I didn't come to this term thinking about those, like a détournement. It actually came from a friend of mine, Raafat Majzoub, an artist, writer, and architect from Tripoli, Lebanon; I think he is based in Beirut right now. He has a practice of what he calls parafiction. What excited me about the term and the way that he was using it was that, somehow, the para in relation to fiction for him was about turning fiction into something that has a different relationship with reality than fiction per se. For him, parafiction is more like a modeling practice. It's like you're doing things which perhaps don't exist, but they create the ground for existence, his fiction is about calling things into being.

In a way, parafiction for him is a kind of rehearsal of reality. The idea of paradisciplinary, it's not so much a relationship to the discipline, but how these disciplines can be used for something else. My orientation to disciplines and disciplinarity overall is more to do with what I find promising or possible, in the intimacy they have with the object of their interest. And so if I can get close to that, I can then orient parts of whatever discipline towards another end, towards my own ends, towards our ends. And that's more what the kind of para alludes to.

And then of course, like para in the sense of parallels and being alongside everything, but kind of separately, but also kind of together. Something like parasitism, you know, like having this kind of symbiotic relationship or like taking what I need from here to keep my own self going.

There's a word you use, which I found really interesting, that kind of resonated or shook something inside me. The word affinity, and wrestling with these, you say, these conditions to relinquish affinity. Affinity really is a big question. In a way, it questions my relationship to these fields of knowledge, these histories of knowledge or these, like, attitudes towards knowledge? And there's something, maybe you can relate to this, like there's something both attractive and repulsive about any discipline and the history of disciplinarity. And so there's something you kind of want, but there's also so much you really don't want to be associated with at all.

"The idea of paradisciplinary, it's not so much a relationship to the discipline, but how these disciplines can be used for something else. My orientation to disciplines and disciplinarity overall is more to do with what I find promising or possible, in the intimacy they have with the object of their interest."

KJR: What really struck me was the language around the parasite. I have a student who is obsessed with the relationships between parasites and hosts, particularly those that enter the host's body, sit dormant for a period, build a whole life inside the host, and then, in some way, slowly eradicate the host.

It is fascinating to think about a practice, given the context of anti-Blackness, to think about what it means to inhabit a discipline not for the purpose of loving it or having an affinity, but in trying to turn it inside out, but very quietly. There's something about the word parasite and you turning that word inside out itself. A parasite is always assumed to be negative, right? Like, this person is so parasitic, this institution is so parasitic, but what does it mean for an artist to actively engage with the logic of the parasite? To not just get what you need from a particular discipline, but to actually slowly, quietly change it, or maybe even destroy it, from the inside. I'm going to be thinking about that a lot, because that's such a curious approach.

NOD: There's also this kind of vulnerability. Parasitism is also a position of dependence. The question at all times is like, who is going to prevail in this relationship? The host's relationship to the parasite is to eradicate it, but the parasite has another agenda. Things are not at ease or at peace; it's not a simple symbiosis. The other frame that I use to think about this is Sylvia Wynter’s writing on sociogenesis—this kind of more complicated set of relations that form us. Somehow, the paradisciplinary idea, for me, is a way to enter the social field that generates our complicated presences.

KJR: And speaking of these complicated presences that form an unform in these social fields, I want to turn to your 2025 essay Throwers (space-rock notes pt. 1). I entered the essay for the rocks and left in awe of the precovery practice among scientists. I was thinking about an ethics of attention: what holds our attention and what it means to return to attention. And the phrase that I've been using a lot in my practice and thinking about annotation and thinking about revision is “returning to the scene of presumed certainty.” The idea of precovery struck me as a refusal of the one look, or of immediacy. This made me think a lot about Sankofa, which at first seemed like a weird association, so I was hesitant. But as I moved into that hesitancy, I became curious about what it means to go back and retrieve something left behind. In this retrieval process, it is not just about returning to get something; it's also about surfacing the perceptual regime that frames something unrecognizable as unmeaningful. It is noise; it is a disruption—it interferes with the presumed goal of the looking. An interruption that complicates frictionless perception. But even more than that, it is about asking ourselves what happened such that we failed to even observe whatever it is at all. This points to what you write about as an “alter-perceptive program.”

How did you arrive at the practice of precovery? A year after the essay’s publication, what still resonates?

iziNyanga, 2005. Photo courtesy of Thailand Biennial.

II. Returning to the Scene of Presumed Certainty: Sankofa and Mayibuye

NOD: This is a nice question because it opens up a methodological dimension of paradisciplinarity. I just found it through a kind of programmatic chance encounter. We have to start knowing that I'm interested in two specific rocks. I was trying to learn as much as I could about those rocks and so I was looking for spaces that have some parallel or equivalent obsession with these rocks. One of those spaces is the small solar system body research that astronomers are doing.

As I was learning about this specific asteroid, 99942 Apophis, there were suddenly so many kinds of coincidental connections. When I say "coincidental," I'm really trying to find better language for it. But what I'm currently calling "co-incidence" is like two seemingly unrelated things happening at the same time, coinciding at a specific moment. It's a kind of meeting, which isn't exactly chance (the math is deterministic not stochastic) but these things which are somehow governed by a set of predictable physical laws are also governed by uncertainty. So their coincidence can still shift the register of both. Suddenly, this practice which the astronomers engage in, precovery, opens up many of the doors that you are also kind of gesturing towards, like Sankofa. And in isiZulu, Mayibuye, which translates to “let it return.” This not-so-chance encounter suddenly delivers an already established but seemingly unrelated language.

KJR: As you write in your essay, precovery is a “practice of digging through residual data, the backgrounds of images and other superfluous material produced in the process of doing other, unrelated, astronomical work. Looking for as-yet-unperceived objects in existing observations. Reprocessing noise to locate signals which were always already there, in what [Fred] Moten calls, our ‘supersensible and nonsensical surround.’”

NOD: And scientists are using precovery in a purely functional way. They're trying to work out the orbital path of a space-rock. In the process of being so goal-oriented, they also miss or reduce the expanded significance of what they're encountering. And so for me, what I'm really trying to work out is what is the expanded significance of this?

What I find interesting about astronomers' use of precovery is that they're looking for observations. They're looking for traces of other people looking, other instances of this event of looking. Like, who else has seen this? When did they see it? It complicates their own practice because they need to become archival researchers. They need to become historians. They need to enter spaces of knowledge which are not produced by them. So they look at images from the past, but they also look at texts. There's a whole history of celestial observations that aren't part of Western scientific tradition but still register events, and they need to look at those. It’s very important for their calculations that there are observations made by people who are not them, in a time that is not now. This highly disciplinary process muddies its own waters. In order to do what they need to do, they need to stop doing what they are doing. It becomes helpful for thinking about this kind of alter perception, alter perceptive program, which is also a bit of a wordplay because the alter altar is kind of Sun-Ra’s gift to us. There is a Pan-African grammar to this essay, but I don’t state it.

III. Diagrammatic Grammars

KJR: As you gesture toward the unspoken, unwritten, opaque Pan-African grammars throughout the essay, I am thinking about what it means to write with a sense of non-enclosure—something capacious, or maybe porous. Your writing method—an unstated but felt presence. To what extent can precovery function as a reading and rereading method—returning to a text to consider your question, “what is the expanded significance of this?”

I want to turn to your diagrammatic practice because it seems to be in dialogue with your commitment to the encounter, construction of relevance, and unstable fields of meaning. I first came to know of your work in 2025, when curator KJ Abudu invited me to design and facilitate a workshop in response to your exhibition, "overturns," which debuted at the Swiss Institute in New York City. I began at your gallery’s website. I was drawn to the work description's reference to diagrammatic drawing, which framed diagrams as a technology of summarization or compression.

What draws you to diagrammatic works in space and on paper?

Biko.Bambara, 2025. Photograph by Daniel Pérez, courtesy of Swiss Institute, New York.

NOD: Diagrams are a language that a kind of Western technical program has sneakily captured. Diagrams sit uncomfortably in technical space in the sense that diagrams are really like a kind of false witness. They reinstate the spiral. They twist the world into poetic and political configurations that are grounded more in acts of relation than facts of apprehension. They’re more testimony than witness. In the literature around the philosophy of logic, they really do not want people to be doing diagrammatic thinking because diagrammatic thinking creates connections without clarifying them. There's a real tension between an essayistic or even mathematical language and diagrammatic language because essayistic language and mathematical language are formally linear. There's a beginning, there's an end, and there's clear directionality. But diagrams really complicate this because their lines betray directionality and produce connection without being precise about its nature. They are overly dependent on interpretation.

This is what I love about your work; it's really in the gesture of the line, the quality of the line, the kind of grammar of the line: a wavy line, a straight line, a curved line—they all suggest a connection without fixing that connection.

If you look at the history of diagrammatic thinking; it is spiritual thinking—a language that comes out of ritual and spiritual logic. I won’t share how I arrive at diagrams. However, I can share some of what makes diagrams still feel compelling to me, even though, formally and superficially, they are overwhelmingly a heuristic language of scientific and technical disciplines. I think this is one of the great sleights of hand, one of many sleights of hand. Still, one of the great ones, because the perceived tone of diagrammatic thinking is this scientific logic where all things are mapped in very hard ways through Western logic, Western rationality, and the kind of authority of the white Western world. But if you scratch at the surface of any diagram, there's always this unreliability problem. And this problem is not incidental; it's part of the material of diagrammatic thinking: it points somewhere else, it points to this other possibility.

This is what I was trying to find with Throwers (space-rock notes pt. 1)—a kind of diagrammatic writing, so writing that jumps between things, that creates parallel connections without resolving them, without saying, “this connects to that” in this particular way. There's clearly a gestural relationship that's being set up. I don't enjoy writing. I find it, maybe everyone does, a difficult task, but the idea of diagrammatic writing feels like it opens something of an essayistic practice that I'm interested in.

"Diagrams are a language that a kind of Western technical program has sneakily captured. Diagrams sit uncomfortably in technical space in the sense that diagrams are really like a kind of false witness. They reinstate the spiral. They twist the world into poetic and political configurations that are grounded more in acts of relation than facts of apprehension. They’re more testimony than witness."

Options, 2019; iterative procedural drawing (a recipe work), chalk marker on wall. Rendered by Andrew Clifford, 2024. Photograph by David Hunter Hale.

KJR: There’s a lot here. A lot of diagrammatic work is pointing—pointing, then pointing again, but you still have to do some sense-making about the purpose of the pointing, not only what the pointing means. Again, I return to Renee Gladman’s work presented in concert with Fred Moten’s writing in One Long Black Sentence. Moten writes, “If you’re looking for something here let me point you in the right direction, towards the prohibited book you’re in at the end of…” And I think about what you mention around gesture and grammar—these two Gs that ground and unsettle us. Regarding the line's grammar, Gladman worked so much with a very particular line grammar. As Moten writes, “The sentence invites this past its end, in the thickening and torquing and fraying and outpouring of the line. This sentence comes in the form of an open tangle.”

Might one imagine the diagram as an “open tangle” of sorts? This resonates with what you’re saying about a diagrammatic essay format. There is a surrender to some sort of inconclusiveness while we wade in the atmosphere of both the stated and unstated. We are invited into the atmosphere, not the weighted or determined ideas. What we do there is up to us. And part of what we can do there is create diagrams alongside your essay—the other diagram—maybe something Umberto Eco would call the “ghost chapters” that emerge during our “inferential walks”...

This sort of movement between things reminds me of what Octavia Estelle Butler said about primitive hypertext back in 1998 during an MIT interview with Samuel R. Delany and others. When she was asked about her relationship to hypertext, following a conversation about the poetics of chance in engaging with a card catalog, she responded that she does not have a computer-based hypertext but has something called a “primitive hypertext.” Primitive in that it is the original, the progenitor of what we have now in our browsers. She says, “I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another.” So I always imagine my favorite forms of writing mirroring this almost thrilling shuttling between different nodes simultaneously, in parallel, and to bring back in precovery, sometimes backward.

I don't enjoy talking directly about my work, and I may have been projecting here. I want to understand how and why artists make things. I am still curious if we can engage in some precovery with you, something you are looking at again in a way, with an expanded aperture in future work.

IV. The Encounter

NOD: I've been obsessed with an eclipse that's happening next year for some time.

For the next Sharjah Biennial, I'm making a short film about something I stumbled upon while obsessing with an eclipse happening on the 2nd of August 2027. Eclipses are defined by the relative geometry between the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. There are a few variations of that geometry that can produce an eclipse, and each specific relative alignment that produces an eclipse repeats every 18 years, 11 days, 8 hours, or 223 synodic months. This is called a saros. Each saros series only lasts for a certain amount of time. There are 71 eclipses in saros 136, and next year's eclipse is the 38th in this cycle. The eclipse in August 2026 was the 48th eclipse of saros 126 and the next time that relative geometry will return will be August 23, 2044. 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours later.

The eclipse I’m fixated on, eclipse #9568, has happened 37 times before and will happen another 33 times after next year, and then after that cycle will be done. That relative geometry will not produce another eclipse after the 30th of July 2622. Maybe 4 or 5 saros cycles ago, this same eclipse happened in 1919. The shadow path of that eclipse crossed the Atlantic, between northern Brazil and West Africa. The Royal Society in London sent two expeditions: one to Northern Brazil and one to the island of Príncipe in West Africa to observe the eclipse and run an experiment to verify Einstein's theory of relativity. In front of the church in the town square of Sobral, Brazil and on the Roça Sundy plantation on the island of Príncipe they made photographs and, based on that, were like, “Oh, this theory is correct, and Newton is wrong. The Renaissance is over.” I’m thinking maybe we can do a precovery of that. This eclipse is always returning; it has a history, it has a future, and it's the same eclipse, but it's also different because, in that geometry, there are other factors, like the Earth's rotation. So it returns, but it’s always casting its shadow somewhere different. Always weaving other times and places into its return. What kind of shadow work is necessary for this encounter?

For example, both of these are plantation geographies. These are transatlantic geographies of enslavement and abolition. It's not just an African thing or an American thing; the eclipse ties them together in a moment when a British team of scientists is trying to verify a German theory. There is a big shift in how the stability of space and time is considered. Under this shadow, relativity turns the world from a stable universe into something that's factually wobbly. And then 18 odd years later this same shadow falls in the Pacific ocean, and then again in Southeast Asia, and then again transits the African continent, and so on until next year.

Somehow a coincidence emerges between too many histories and futures to fully contend with. I’m thinking about how a short film might be a useful apparatus to encounter this recurring shadow. That we can somehow think with this short inversion of day and night. Kind of like how birds stop singing or solar panels stop generating electricity for just long enough to matter. There’s a kind of cosmological landscape where the land, the actual ground, the specific location on the planet is indispensable to the possibility of the shadow. I guess I’m trying to think that a shadow needs to land, and that land here means something more than territory, it’s a verb, and it returns.

There's a kind of methodological trace in this story but I find speaking about work, except to people like you, amongst friends, peers, and conspirators, a little bit beside the point.

Black Liberation Zodiac (Molalatladi + Maselatheko), 2024; wallpaper installation. Photograph by Dillion Marsh at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, 2025.

KJR: Whenever I do interviews, I always try to actively create detours or my own underground tunnels within the genre. I do enjoy making work, but I also make work because I recognize that creating a material object that sits in a very specific context is, quite honestly, the sleight of hand to get people to talk about certain things.

NOD: I’ve been thinking about it. It's got something to do with, like, the scale of the encounter—like when you see a diagram as a whole, you encounter it as an image. That image carries this weight of a history of images, a technical history of Whiteness, of a particular kind of violence, of knowledge of all of these kinds of things, and that in itself is like at least one register of use and engagement with what a diagram looks like and can do.

Working in diagrams, as you do and as I do, we're probably engaged in that register. But there’s something that happens between the scales of an encounter: between the full diagram, which acts as an image, and the fragmented diagram as a series of specific lines and nodes. As you move closer to the relational gestures and their logics, you lose the certainty of the image. I think the nature of diagrams is to dissolve.

Another thing that I really appreciate about your work, and I think we share, is an interest in scale: the size of the work at a scale larger than the body. It intensifies a logic of movement, conceptually, from the scale of the image to the scale of the line. As you physically move your body, as you approach the diagram, you lose the possibility of the whole except as a figment of personal memory. You're left engaging with these kind of like discrete lines and nodes and vertices. I think that in those moments, when you have a more or less incomplete set of terms or nodes or images to hold on to, you’re conjuring another space between them, a relational field which is more like Pope. L’s holes. You know there's this space, and you are invited—and I mean you in a particular sense—to either decipher or even inscribe a meaningfulness to the specific line and the relations between them. A specific “you,” an opaque “you,” is an absolute necessity for reading this kind of work. This is the interference, the kind of resonance where the work, in a sense, disappears and what emerges is the work under the work. You enter it, and suddenly there's something that's more than just the image, more than just this object that can be described and photographed and can travel through these networks of circulation. There's something that happens that's about the meaningfulness of this relational field because it's also about what you bring to this, and also how much space there is in the artwork for you to fill.

KJR: I cannot show up to your work just hoping that it tells me something; I have to do something. I have to walk into the invitation. I have to, like, get closer. I have to dance with the work. There's choreography to my engagement. One of the best lessons I learned about choreography was in 2006 when I was taking classes at the Artist Proof Studio in Newton, which was then an arts district in Johannesburg, South Africa. An artist came to share their work and I remember someone mentioning how small they were. When he was asked why, he said he wanted his work to draw the viewer in: Sondela eduze, or “come closer,” in isiZulu. There is such a poetics in thinking about one's body in relation to a work, like literally being gravitationally pulled and then jolting yourself back out to get these different valences of the work. And depending upon the scale of the diagram, your body becomes part of the diagram. The nodes are no longer just what we painted or drew, but the interaction of overlapping bodily shadows and obscured sightlines.

The market logics of producing static, digestible, and tenable works dictate far too much. We write the people out of the art: the relation. We try to make the opaque, transparent.

"[...] When you see a diagram as a whole, you encounter it as an image. That image carries this weight of a history of images, a technical history of Whiteness, of a particular kind of violence, of knowledge of all of these kinds of things, and that in itself is like at least one register of use and engagement with what a diagram looks like and can do."

Model for an Endless Column (detail), 2025; Photograph by Ondřej Polák at Galerie Rudolfinum.

V. Poetics and Politics of Relation

NOD: In this, like a Glissantian universe, opacity is a condition for relation, and without opacity, no relation is possible. If there's no opacity, you get, like, consumption, absorption, assimilation, and this is basically a relationship with yourself. When we try to consume what he would call the “other,” we end up with just a relationship to ourselves. But relating requires something you cannot know. It feels like there is a cloud of holes and voids, or an underground of all of these other kinds of hidden, unseen, and unseeable things in our conversation, and it resonates in me with that Glissantian condition of relation. The not-knowing is necessary.

We understand that the international contemporary art world is an industry structured around consumption and that consumption maps very closely onto colonial, racial, and gendered forms of exploitation and presentation. The question, or the struggle, is: how do you take something you are compelled to do and maintain it under these conditions? This is where these ideas of methods of practice that we’ve been talking about are so important and continue to resonate for me because, in the face of this industry, is there a way that the work can still maintain itself?

"We understand that the international contemporary art world is an industry structured around consumption and that consumption maps very closely onto colonial, racial, and gendered forms of exploitation and presentation. The question, or the struggle, is: how do you take something you are compelled to do and maintain it under these conditions?"

KJR: Maintaining commitment to one’s practice in this context is very difficult. You are, to a certain extent, saying, “I recognize the limitations this will place on my circulation,” because the more and more I refuse a certain type of capture, there are consequences.

NOD: We are coerced into engaging in these kinds of anti-life relations—to present yourself for consumption, to present yourself as something consumable, which is to say to present yourself like something that at the end will no longer be here. We are consumed and no longer able to produce the conditions to sustain our own life. Material questions of making a living are always real and important. The struggle is: how can we avoid a complete dissolution into this field of consumption and extraction? I'm really invested in the contradictions of practice. I think that's how we understand where we are and what we're doing. It's not so much about trying to find, like, a purity, but about continuously asking these questions. It is about committing to keep asking this question, which expands the space in which we can do this work. How can we present the work without presenting ourselves for complete annihilation?

KJR: When you said dissolution, I was thinking about it in terms of chemistry where you're taking a solvent and you're mixing it with the goal being that the solution becomes homogeneous—you cannot distinguish between the two, once-separate things. So when you say dissolution to the point that you're no longer there, there's something about this very particular moment in making art that I think about a lot. This insistence that we talk more about the art object itself, even to the exclusion of how we get somewhere, feels like an intentional distraction. I am committed to talking about methodology because the methods we make, embody, or live inside of and are shaped by our ethics.

And these ethics are shaped by latent and not-so-latent suspicions. Are there things that you're thinking about now, whether ideas, dispositions, or context, that provoke suspicion for you? What are you suspicious about right now?

Black Liberation Zodiac (Kgositsile’s Folly), 2022–ongoing; wallpaper, bowl, water, cowrie shell. Photograph by Daniel Pérez, courtesy of Swiss Institute, New York.

NOD: I am thinking of Keorapetse Kgositsile, a South African poet in exile. One of my favorite books of his is The Present Is a Dangerous Place to Live (1974/1975). It always prompts me to ask myself this question: “In whose interest is this?” The contradictions of practice are really unavoidable. Modern histories of Black arts in South Africa are entangled in complicated religious and developmental missionary programs and geopolitical agendas, Afrophobia, anti-Blackness, and anti-communism, and there are always multiple interests involved in promoting colonial ideas about who, what, and where we are. They have their interest in us doing things in a particular way, but, as we participate in all this, it’s useful to ask ourselves in whose interest are we doing these things. People can help you while not acting in your interest. Keorapetse Kgositsile has this one word: “pastpresentfuture.” I love this word because that's where we're at. I really do not trust a universal framework of now—that we are all experiencing the same now. Anything that's a bit overly concerned with the now is suspicious (shoutout to Michelle M. Wright’s articulation of multiple nows and the multiplicity of Black presence). What's happening right now is not a universal moment; we are everywhere, every time.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner and death doula-in-training. She explores the poetics and politics of non-compliance and disobedience across written, spoken, and visual communication systems. Her work explores gestures of noise, disobedience, excess, and unintelligibility that generate friction within systems that demand efficiency and immediate legibility. In this exploration, she is curious about methods that nurture elastic ways of (un)knowing. Her work strives not only to make art objects, but also to create situations — rituals — substrates for continued learning and refusal. She currently serves as the inaugural Charles Gaines Chair at the California Institute of the Arts and as a critic at Yale University’s School of Art. Recent solos include High Line Art (2026), Henry Art Gallery (2025), REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). She has participated in group exhibitions at the MoMA PS1, Studio Museum, the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Palais de Tokyo, MASS MoCA, The Kitchen, and the ICA Philadelphia, among others. Rasheed has received several honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2022).