KELI SAFIA MAKSUD
Artist Statement
The overarching theme in my practice is the politics of identity. I am interested in how national identities are constructed, maintained, and also how they are negotiated through everyday practices of refusal. It is crucial that I give a sense of my own 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 self within a language or discourse in which blackness is absent? It is the result of this fragmentation in my identity that I find an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking to be the most accurate way of making sense of the world. Through sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking and embroidery my works explores colonial inheritances, cultural memory and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.