Baseera Khan: The Liberator

Baseera Khan’s sculpture The Liberator (2022) points to ongoing and global struggles for justice, as well as the complicated relationships between Western museums, capital, and cultural identity. The artwork, representative of Khan’s multi-faceted practice, was awarded the final commission in the six-episode television series, The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, featured on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel, produced in collaboration with the Hirshhorn as part of an initiative to share art and art-making with a national audience.

The artist presents a 3-D printed acrylic bust rendered after digitally manipulating a scan of their own body, created in response to Naro Dakini, an 18^th-century sculpture of a Buddhist deity in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Asian Art. The artist composed this work for the final episode of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, which aired on MTV and the Smithsonian Channel this spring.

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