Keli Safia Maksud

Keli Safia Maksud 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 identities and its threshold, and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.

Maksud’s 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 Huxley-Parlour, Miriam Gallery, Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Seoul, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.

Keli Safia Maksud, Anthems, Embroidery on Paper, 9 x 12”, 2020

Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?

My practice involves a lot of research and the work that is produced as a result of this research is interdisciplinary. I am interested in ideas around identity formation and enjoy thinking about these ideas from different angles, which then necessitates working in different mediums. The process often begins with a fairly large question and then I spend quite some time digging through documents, reading books and articles, and speaking with different people on the subject. In doing so, I am able to zoom in or narrow things down into an iteration of the larger question. I enjoy this type of movement where something very narrow or specific radiates outwards into larger structures or vice versa. I also enjoy dealing with one thing from different angles. Through this research process I am able to figure out what medium to work in, in order to best tell the story of the specific iteration. I’m not a specialist in any one medium and nor do I want to be. I studied drawing and painting in undergrad and then spent the years after graduating trying to unlearn the rules because I felt constrained within them. I more interested in how to bring different ideas and mediums together in unconventional ways. I also enjoy collaborating with other artists as it adds a different perspective.

My current project, which deals with national anthems, began with me using sewing and embroidery as a drawing tool. The embroidery started as an experiment but it’s now what really what holds the project together. I began by sewing music scores of the various national anthems into paper resulting in a double-sided document where on the one side, you have something that resembles music and the other something nonlinear and abstract. Having this front and back has worked as a useful framework to think about national identities in that on the one side we see how the state envisions itself and its subjects but on the other, we can see what is actually happening on the ground. I also started to think about the back side as graphic notation so that these embroidered documents could be sounded into something new and performed. So many of the ways that identities, particularly on the national level, are formed is through acts of repetition and I employ this in my work but the more things are repeated the more abstracted they become.

Tell us more about your work in the show.

As I mentioned above, my research is centered on national anthems that were produced post-independence in various African countries. When African countries gained independence, they created new national anthems that would speak the new ideas about these new nations. These anthems however, were composed using European musical conventions (notation and instrumentality) and many were modeled after former colonial powers exposing the contradictory nature of postcolonial subject formation where self-determination mirrored the former colonial powers while also speaking to the newly independent states. Put differently, these new states continued to use European tools of imagining while also rejecting European ideology.

This research has led me in different directions. Currently, I am particularly interested in how space is constructed through music and sound. In a sense, national anthems can be thought of as sonic borders but as we know, sound is omni directional and cannot be contained. As such,

I am interested in notions of uncontainability and use ideas based on leakage (as in acoustic leakage) and bleed (as in light or sound bleed) as a framework to think about excess (as in being in excess of). Untitled Composition I and II were made with these ideas in mind. I was thinking about gathering or assembling together, entanglement and metamorphosis of spaces. Many of the ways in which we understand nation states, borders, boundaries, urban cities etc. come from an inherited colonial blueprint but the lived experience is often in excess of this blueprint. These works consider how the boundaries of these blueprints are broken by everyday practices of refusal.

What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?

When I am working, I solely listen to jazz and think a lot about improvisation. I draw from artists such as Kapwani Kiwanga, Torkwase Dyson and Sable Elyse Smith whose practices seem to be a process disentangling larger structural systems such as race, geography, colonization, carceral systems etc. I return to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, because it gives me language to think about uncontainable bodies, riot, collective voice and one’s right to opacity. I’ve also always been fascinated with the metamorphosis of urban spaces and cities and love to look at city plans and maps. I reference Bauhaus design and minimalism in my sculptural work and also spend time looking at graphic notation.

Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence, has that changed?

I’m just starting to go out to shows again and this past weekend, I checked out various performances that were part of Performa Biennial which all took place outdoors at different sites around the city. Exhibitions and performances that happen in galleries can feel like they are only in conversation with very specific group of people in terms of who actually gets to view or encounter it, but there is something so exciting about the openness of works that are staged outdoors. I also just discovered a space called Housing which has really interesting and experimental programming.

Who are some of your favorite artists? Or who has been inspirational recently?

Lately, I’ve been pretty obsessed with Shikeith, Cauleen Smith, Ralph Lemon. I’m thinking a lot about performance and choreography.

Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?

I’m currently in a show at Miriam Gallery that closes on November 7 and there will be a conversation between myself and Sable Elyse Smith on November 3.

Keli Safia Maksud’s work is included in our show “Time Wont Tell,” November 3rd - December 30th, 2021. Visit her website here or her Instagram @kelisafiamaksud

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