Artist Statement and Bio

Statement: In a world of binaries, Khan challenges this notion. Neither black nor white, Khan and her practice sit at the African Arab Asian ocean world crossroads. A place where cosmopolitan cultures and ethnicities cross-fermented for millennia. Her making allows the engaged participants and collaborators to re-member pasts and re-unite with nuanced cultural histories hidden, erased, or distorted. Via cuisine, plants, or the senses, Khan re-introduces us to the beauty of multiplicities within ourselves and world. 

Bio: Sarah K. Khan, multimedia maker/scholar, writes and makes art—paper, books, prints, photography, porcelain and films — about food, culture, women and migrants. Her work is informed from fieldwork and research globally. She has lived with Bedouins in Palestine and documented the plight of Indian women farmers. She traverses the world of Queens NY, and films women cooks and farmers about their foodways in Fez, Morocco. Her most recent bodies of works—prints, animation and porcelain—inspired by a 16th Century Central Indian Persian Cook/Book of Life from Central India, are a result of multiple residencies. 

She studied Middle Eastern history (BA), public health and nutrition (MPH, MS) and traditional ecological knowledge systems/plant sciences in South Asia and China (PhD). A two-time Fulbright scholar, Khan has earned multiple art residencies, grants and fellowships. Details about her solo, group exhibitions, and film screenings are available here . Recent works have appeared in at BRIC Media Arts Gallery (Speak Sing Shout: We, Too, Sing America),  Women and Migration(s), Reponses in Art History I,  Women and Migration(s) II, the Museum of the Moving Image (films), Madison Children’s Museum, The Kimmel Gallery at NYU, Queens Museum, Asian Arts Initiative, and Asian American Writers Workshop Open City .

Her residencies include Anderson Ranch Residency (2024), Women Studio Workshop (2023), Kohler Arts/Industry Residency (2022), Princeton Artist-in-Residence ArtHx (2021-22), Ellis Beauregard (2021), Monson Arts (2021), Project for Empty Space Feminist Residency (2020), Indigo Arts Alliance (2019), and the Boren Chertkov Residency for Labor and Justice at Blue Mountain Center (2019). Her work has exhibited nationally and internationally and exists in permanent and private collections. @sarahkkhan

BACKGROUND
The Book of Delights (1469–1500 CE), sparked my recent bodies of works—prints, ceramics, motion graphics. The cookbook, written in Persian and illustrated in the Sultanate miniature painting tradition, depicts African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serving and surrounding the Sultan Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. He commissioned the cookbook in Shadiabad, his retirement City of Joy. Largely intact, the miniatures include detailed cookware, flora, and pastel-vibrant illustrations. Polyethnic attendants, frozen in half or three-quarter profiles, prepare spice-laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs with skill. At the Sultan’s request, the women hunt, fish, and engage in animated culinary, philosophical and religious debates. 

The illustrated cookbook demands a recasting. Few notice the attendants who harvest, hunt, cook and debate. The original images portray cosmopolitan femmes/women who serve, and most likely service the Shah. We know little about these women’s lives. From where, in that vast Central Indian and African Indian Ocean World, did they come? What were their nuanced narratives? Did they consider the work a delight? I ask, if the polyethnic world of the zenāna/ harem prospered unfettered, with the Sultan cancelled, what might these un-imagined lives and worlds dream into? And here is where you find the work today. It is in dismantling and reframing The Book of Delights with an emphasis on the femmes, foodways, and plants that I expansively imagine. This action buries one visual narrative and births, not only seriously playful characters, but also selves and unimagined others too. By recasting the past, I assure boundless futures.

Link to Kohler Arts/Industry Residency I talk about Weapons of Mass Creation/Destruction.

One theme of several that runs throughout the bodies of artwork is elevating and recognizing domestic women spaces as places of science, deep ecological knowledge, pleasure and defiance. And that these shero-femmes wield great powers of creativity and agency with the tools of their culinary and healing arts. My newly interpreted blue and white ware includes The Spoons: Poison or Pander and encompass other decorated foodware, weapons of mass creation and weapons of mass destruction such as Rolling Pins: Bake or Bludgeon, Lugers: Defend of Destroy, Scythes: Cultivate or Kill, Meat Mincers: Mince or Mutilate, Small Swords: Slit or Stab, 24K Gold-Leafed Jagged Knives: Carve or Cleave, Daggers: Relish or Rip, and so on. 

I engage in storytelling via print making, photography and films. Upon receiving a Kohler Arts/Industry residency in 2022 to create in the Pottery, I learned the basics of slip cast molding, glazing and firing in the flagship Kohler factory setting. I created and learned alongside seasoned slip casters, plaster mold makers, professional glazers. And, I had at my disposal all the factory tools and machines. As a printmaker I often say, “Why make one when you can make a hundred?" With the assistance and knowledge of skilled artists and technicians at Kohler, I made multiples of foodware and weapons of mass creation/destruction that I saw and/or imagined in the cookbook. Simultaneously, I playfully imagine these femmes, endow them with nuanced lives and fabricate them beyond the confines of denied and erased histories. I assure futures by recasting the past.