Keli Safia Maksud

Visual description: The installation consists of human-scale black metal stands situated on the floor. Attached at the top of each metal stand is a white paper embroidered with white, black, and navy blue text. Engaging with spatiality, speakers on the floor emit sound while light bulbs behind the paper create a subtle glow. 

Wall Text: Since its independence from France in 1960, Cameroon has had three different national anthems. In the installation, Keli Safia Maksud includes five-minute sound excerpts and their lyrics embroidered on paper from each one. Sonically, the work considers transitions of political power and freedom as a constant struggle; national anthems were modeled after European archetypes and changed as political power shifted. The thread in some is falling apart suggesting the need for renewal while light illuminates the rhizomatic lines through the paper, creating a visual noise. Although African people started to demand liberation from their European colonizers after World War I, a larger Pan-African movement–to unite and liberate African countries—developed after World War II and these processes have been marked by conflict. In much of her work, Maksud explores the use of music—sound, echo, and listening—and the role they play in the ongoing decolonization of the African continent.

About

Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s 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 Salon 94 in New York, NY, Huxley Parlour in UK, the Bamako Biennial in Mali, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul in South Korea, Galería Nueva in Spain and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in Brazil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine and A Space Gallery.