Keli Safia Maksud
Bio: Keli Safia Maksud (b. 1985) is a Kenyan- Tanzanian-Canadian-Muslim-Christian visual artist and writer based in New York. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s interdisciplinary practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold, and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.
Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at the Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Seoul, Galería Nueva and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: The overarching theme in my practice is the politics of identity. I am interested in interrogating how national identities are constructed and contested through everyday practices of refusal thus exposing spaces of contradiction. It is crucial that I give a sense of my background as it runs hand in hand with my practice. I was born in Kenya to Tanzanian parents of Muslim and Christian faith, making me a Kenyan- Tanzanian-Muslim-Christian. In addition, having only ever attended British, Canadian and American schools, I cannot deny what Franz Fanon calls, Presence Europeenne as a constitutive element of my identity. How does one postulate a black and/or African self within a language or discourse in which blackness is absent? It is a result of this fragmentation in my identity that I find interdisciplinarity, as a methodology, to be the most accurate and naturalist way of making sense of the world.
Provisional Notes on Freedom, (Dimensions Variable, Installation, 2021)
First Year Exhibition
Anthems, (36 x 89 x 10 in, Mixed media installation (paper, embroidery floss, graphite, thread, metal, and magnets), 2020)
Open Studios
