Digital Residency: Sarah Khan

Take This Dove Out of my Hands is a meditation on kinship using space as a sonic language to generate a sense of ownership amidst the noise of everyday environments in public spaces.

Filmed on location outside Sarah Khan and performer Kaivalya Brewerton's home, this space inherently connected to the pair explores the limits of habitual gestures through an improvised performance. Technically the film experiments with night vision, its structure, and pacing a parallel to the limitations and barriers we inhabit daily, from labour and leisure, to embodying the chaos and temporality of the everyday.

In turn, the film acts as a smoke bomb, an eruption making the deity of everyday gestures visible.

Sarah Khan is an artist whose practice spans film, text, sound and performance. Drawing from her lived experience and positionality, Sarah’s works explore the intersections of cross-cultural identity, personal and collective memory, and belonging. She is interested in undoing the dismissal of narratives that exist beyond central understanding and exploring how exclusion is confronted by the ‘othered’ in a context of Western homogeneity. Sarah is a co-founder of the collective Baesianz that centres artists of Asian heritage. She graduated with an MA in Writing from the Royal College of Art in June 2021.

Her mentor during this residency is artist and filmmaker Sweatmother