ART CITIES: N.York-Keli Safia Maksud
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and the effects of these encounters on memory and identities, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold — working toward destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.
By Dimitris Lempesis
PHOTO: Cue Art Foundation Archive
Keli Safia Maksud’s solo exhibition “worried notes” 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. Utilizing musical notation as a starting point, the exhibition reflects upon inherited identities, cultural memory, and received histories. A “worried note” — also called a “blue note” — is a term in musicology that refers to a note that falls slightly below one that exists on the Western 12-tone major scale. Present in blues, jazz, and gospel music, and derived from African vocalization that is not based on the major scale, worried notes are often thought — within the construct of Western music — to contribute to sound that is expressive and intense, conveying emotions such as pain, longing, melancholy, and despair. It is in this space of dissonance that Maksud plays with boundaries often considered to be objective or inherent. Using embroidery as a language, she exposes traces of the past that inform our present context, stitching fragments of sheet music from African national anthems onto carbon paper. Many of these anthems, developed in the wake of colonial departure from the continent, sought to create shared identities for citizens of newly independent nations. However, they were often modeled after the anthems of former colonial powers in notation, instrumentality, and concept. In repeating the musical norms of the West, they reinforced sonic — and cultural — borders analogous to those created through the haphazardous partitioning of Africa. “worried notes” engages with the complexities of this cultural legacy, asking us to consider the spaces in between and beyond that which can be measured. Sound is omnidirectional and difficult to contain. Maksud’s embroidered works map conventions that formalize it into a particular kind of music, but in doing so also reveal entwined, rhizomatic threads on their reverse side, materially referencing the leakage that begs to exist outside of imposed demarcations. Carbon paper functions as a reprographic device that speaks to modes of repetition. The visualization of music in the form of scores — a process that originated from the creation of incisions — evokes the violence embedded in systems of representation. Light and sound interfere with the visual field, creating new frequencies that reverberate and make perceptible forms of resistance. Through this layering of gestures, Maksud composes both an elegy to the agony of embodied hegemony and a hopeful ode to new hybridities. worried notes provokes an awakening to the lingering traumas of colonial entanglement and its persistence in the tenor of our times.
Photo: Keli Safia Maksud, studio image of recent work, 2023. Photo courtesy the artist
Info: Curator: Abigail DeVille, Cue Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY, U.S.A., Duration: 13/7-12/8/2023, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://cueartfoundation.org/
