Kahlil Kasir is known for their bare, constrained images of the medicalized body: paintings and comics in which the sick / disabled figure looks out at the viewer with a gaze that might be empty or confrontational or both.
Kasir’s graphic memoir, excerpted below, traces illness’s aesthetic styles — searing visceral intensity, monotonous blanks of time, pain as invisible and intimate partner. In their comics, Kasir’s lines are smudged graphite outlines, which relay the stillness and minute shifts of their body with an unsparing, almost schematic style. Kasir’s paintings are fleshier: thickly encrusted surfaces of bunched sheets, hospital gowns, and skin within a selectively flattened composition of shapes.
It Hurts Until It Doesn’t was published by Diskette Press in September 2022 and can be purchased here.
—Tony Wei Ling
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Excerpt, It Hurts Until It Doesn’t, 2022.
ICU, 2022
Fall Risk, 2022
Untitled, 2022
Always There, 2022
Kahlil Kasir is a multidisciplinary artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They primarily create paintings, comics, and animations. Their work focuses on disability, mental illness, the healthcare system, and abuse. Their work could be found on Instagram @kahlillkasir and Twitter @Kahlil_Kasir.