Keli Safia Maksud
Work
worried notes
ttttaappp
old blue new bruises
They Try Their Tongues
Provisional Notes on Freedom
Black Codes
Untitled Compositions
Untitled Anthem
Anthems
Faces of Africa
Mitumba
Exhibitions
Writing
About
CV
Biography
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery. Drawing on histories of colonial encounter and their enduring effects on memory, Maksud's practice is drawn to the liminal — the uncertain, generative space in-between — as a site from which to destabilize official narratives and unmask the fictions of the state.
Maksud’s work has been featured at the Hessel Museum of Art (New York), Cue Art Foundation (New York), Goodman Gallery, Salon 94, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul, among other venues. In 2019 she was a participant in the Bamako Biennial and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in 2015. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art, and the National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art Korea among others. 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 writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine and A Space Gallery.
Currently, she is a resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program 2025 - 2026 in New York.
Artist Statement
My practice investigates the intersections of space, identity, and power, as enduring legacies colonialism. Working across installation, drawing, sculpture, sound, and embroidery, my works explore diagrammatic systems of representation emerging from architecture, cartography, spatial planning, and music (specifically national anthems) calling attention to how space and time are ordered. On the one hand, these systems are communicative tools used to realise concepts and ideas into material construction; and on the other, tools that regulate, surveil, and enact an architecture that governs how bodies move through space. I am interested in the standardization that such systems present as unitary languages of homogeneous experience and how those whose experience falls outside such constructions of sameness are denied and othered by and in it. Central to my research is a consideration of the “line” as the substrate of all these systems, enforcing and rearticulating binaries like inside/outside, here/there, and us/them. I aim to disrupt and reconfigure these colonial structures by "breaking the line"—a gesture that challenges the epistemological supports that legitimise and secure the violent reproduction of enclosures of captivity and the nation-state model.
Contact
kelisafiamaksud@gmail.com