Shifter: Waiting | Mustafa Faruki and Kameelah Janan Rasheed

A businessperson waits for a delayed subway. A wrongly convicted prisoner awaits justice. A refugee waits for their asylum case. A nation waits for the promised boon of economic development. The world waits for a vaccine. Nature waits for its exploitation to end. 

Waiting is usually what we do between things. It is the space between two destinations, an empty and anxious time to fill with distractions. But when we look more closely, we see that waiting is also an activity in itself, bristling with energy, uncertainty, and inequality. What does the condition of waiting reveal about us, our world, and the natural environment that sustains it? 

This series of eight sessions offer glimpses into the thought and practices of artists, architects, historians, and theorists who grapple with this question.

In this hour-long session, Mustafa Faruki will discuss his work on the “Celebatorium,” a site of temporal suspension that forecloses futurity. Conversely, Kameelah Janan Rasheed will discuss people who seek immortality – that is those who wait forever.A brief moderated discussion and audience Q&A will follow. 

These events, and the resulting publication, Shifter 25: Waiting, are co-hosted by MIT List Visual Arts Center and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati in conjunction with solo exhibitions by Sreshta Rit Premnath to be held in March 2021 (MIT List Center) and October 2021 (CAC).

About the Speakers

Mustafa Faruki is the founding partner of theLab-lab for architecture, a design practice that has completed work for a number of  institutional clients, including: desire, memory, irony, alienation, humor, vulgarity and loss. Projects by theLab-lab have been installed at or received support from the Drawing Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and the 2019 Triennale di Milano. In 2017, theLab-lab was awarded the League Prize for Young Architects by the Architectural League of New York, and in 2020 the firm’s work was acquired by MoMA for its permanent collection.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is invested in the shifting ecosystems of Black epistemologies, and the agile relationships between the varied modes of reading, writing, archiving, editing, translating, publishing, reflecting upon, and arranging narratives about lived Black experiences. Rasheed has exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale; Institute for Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine; Brooklyn Museum; Queens Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Bronx Museum; Brooklyn Public Library; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, and The Kitchen, New York, among others. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2020).

About Shifter

Shifter explores the intersection of contemporary art, theory, and experimental writing. They convene public dialogues and produce publications. Shifter is programmed by Sreshta Rit Premnath and Avi Alper