Kameelah Janan Rasheed – Lucid Dream

I would know a lot more than I was ever able to appear to know

Lucid Dream (2022) is a short video film by the American conceptual artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed. The work explores the politics and poetics of consciousness, drawing specific inspiration from lucid dreams, dream journals, and rituals. Text fragments, abstract motifs, and natural landscapes are interspersed with scenes set to music showing people who have influenced the artist over the years, among them the American writers Octavia E. Butler and Lucille Clifton. Rasheed connects these diverse impressions with an array of artistic devices including film material that she paints and modifies, and its constant interruption with film scenes full of poetic power. While the artist made repeated attempts to speak about the phenomenon of lucid dreams in the past, she found that her explanations led to the temporary absence of said dreams. Lucid Dream is Rasheed’s artistic way of capturing these impressions without attempting a clear explanation, and she has said she views the work as a metaphor for her artistic work as a whole.

Lucid Dream, 2022, single-channel video, color, original Score by Th&o. (Johannesburg, South Africa), 4’27” in loop

Text based on Kameelah Janan Rasheed: i am not done yet: Exhibition as Hyper- text—The Aspect of (Un-)Learning, Retexting and Layering in the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed by Sergey Harutoonian for Mousse Magazine.