Selected Exhibitions
Installation view, Oh the Way A Mineral Fractures. Photo: Cal Siegle 2025.
Oh the Way A Mineral Fractures
group show curated by Cal Siegel
Astor Weeks, New York
2025
This show is about language’s capacity to do more than describe and our ability as viewers to do more than interpret. In her poem, Geology Night Sky, Bernadette Mayer transforms the technical language of geological formations into the components of a cosmic love poem. Through this alchemical affair, Mayer sidesteps the trappings of identification. What if something had to be ruptured, fragmented in order for a
process of understanding to begin? The three artists in this show favor modes of storytelling rather than mere naming; means that function in the temporal realm of the allegorical rather than the fixed one of the symbolic. Read more
Installation view, Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2025.Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken
Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Sibia Sarangan
Hessel Museum of Art, New York
2025
How do official histories contradict and erase lived experience, and how can we expand the potential of memory as a tool for subversion?
Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken brings together recent works by Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, and Suneil Sanzgiri that assert personal and collective experience over prescribed colonial narratives. The artists challenge entrenched paradigms of temporality, identity, and liberation by complicating past and present, fiction and truth—or what we have come to believe is the truth. Read more
Essay by Sibia Sarangan
Installation view, Babel. Photo: courtesy of gallery 2024.Babel
group show curated by Sanna Almajedi
SARA’S, New York
2024
Babel is an exhibition and performance series featuring works by Sam Anderson, Ali Eyal, Emma Fujiko, Yimiao Liu, Keli Safia Maksud, Asif Mian, Timmy Simonds, Stipan Tadić, and the duo Liz Phillips and Heidi Howard.In the tradition of Fluxus, Babel invites viewers to consider whether performance can continue to offer visual artists a sense of freedom to create in a meaningful and sometimes bizarre way. Read more
Installation view, worried notes. Photo: Leo Ng 2024.worried notes
solo exhibition
Cue Art Foundation, New York
2024
worried notes is a solo exhibition by Keli Safia Maksud with mentorship from Abigail DeVille. The exhibition builds upon the artist’s ongoing interest in the formation of national identity, particularly in relation to post-colonial African statehood. Through sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery, Maksud explores notions of replication and standardization as enduring influences of colonialism — and as processes that continue to shape individual and collective understandings of self. Read more
Catalogue Essay by Jordan Jones
Installation view, old blues new bruises. Photo: Sebastian Bach, 2023.old blues new bruises
solo exhibition
A.I.R., New York
2023
Mapping and sound are at the center of old blues new bruises. Drawing from diagrammatic systems such as musical notation, architecture, and city planning, and practices of counter-mapping that are used in multiple disciplines to reclaim colonized territory, Maksud presents an aurally and visually rich environment in the gallery, including embroidery on carbon paper, sound, and light. Read more
Installation view, Conflictual Distance. Photo: Julia Gillard, 2023. Courtesy of EFA Project Space and The Immigrant Artist Biennial.Conflictual Distance
group exhibition curated by Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Katherine Adams, and Anna Mikaela Ekstrand as part of The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone
EFA Project Space, New York
2023
Conflictual Distance probes concrete approaches to presenting distant conflicts to local publics. The exhibition considers conflict through the lens of political exile and cultural diasporas, focusing on immigrant artists’ experimental approaches to processing distant conflicts in local contact zones. When exhibitions are so often asked to carry out various forms of site-specific placemaking, called on to speak to an immediately present public, how can we make visible those experiences that are not fully legible from within an exhibition site's immediate surroundings? Read more
Installation view, A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You. Photo: Mike Hall, 2022.A Different Now is Close Enough to Exhale on You
group show curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
2022
The exhibition’s conceptual framework extends from musings over the lyrical content of Cameroonian singer-songwriter and political activist Lapiro de Mbanga’s anthem No Make Erreur (1986). At the heart of the show is an exploration of the systems and relationships that comprise the history of power, extraction and exploitation. It also highlights the histories of resilience, defiance and communion that exist despite dehumanising forms of subjugation. Read more
Installation view, I belong to this. Photo: Deniz Guzel, 2021.I belong to this
group show curated by Justine Kurland
Huxley Parlour, London
2021
‘I belong to this brings seventeen artists together around themes of self and family, private rites and communal ritual, along a continuum of becoming. The title of the show is from Ariana Reines’s poem “Save the World”, and can be read as a declaration of identification, a promise of solidarity, or a blurring of self into multitudes. These artists mark an intractable this.' - Justine Kurland Read more
Installation view, Countercapture. Photo: Zach Hyman, 2021.Countercapture
group show curated by Katherine Adams
Miriam Gallery, New York
2021
Operating at the limits of the image, artists in Countercapture recalibrate the standard representational capture of Blackness. The featured works use redaction variously as material ground, as methodological process, and as fugitive strategy, gesturing toward alternative paradigms for image-making. Countercapture looks at redaction and opacity as aesthetically and politically constructive processes that make-present while refusing transparent access to bodies and subjects, in the vein of a “right to opacity” as articulated by Édouard Glissant. Read more