embroidery on paper, metal studs, metal tracks, unistruts, 6-channel looped sound and 3-channel video, 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.
Utilizing diagrammatic systems of notation as a starting point, worried notes examines 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 and embossing fragments of architectural blueprints, cartography, mathematical formulas, and music onto carbon paper. The musical fragments, in particular, represent pieces of various African national anthems, which were developed in the wake of colonial departure from the continent and 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, structure, and concept. In repeating the musical norms of the West, they reinforced sonic — and cultural — borders analogous to those created through the haphazardous geographic partitioning of Africa.
worried notes engages with the complexities of this context, asking us to consider the spaces in between and beyond that which can be measured. Maksud’s “notes” map representational conventions such as shapes, symbols, lines, and numbers that have been codified in various industries and realms of inquiry. In abstracting them from their source material, she seeks to call attention to how we order space, time, and distance, and to challenge the legacies that constrain our movement to predefined limits and trajectories.
Reflecting upon drawing as a political act, Maksud utilizes straight lines and rigid forms — geometric devices often associated with modernism that project aspirations of rationality, enlightenment, and control. However, she generates a unique visual language that resists translation and embraces opacity as a right of those who exist outside of systems of global influence. Standard sized sheets of carbon paper function as a reprographic device that speaks to modes of repetition. The act of stitching by hand results in entwined, rhizomatic threads on the reverse side of the paper, materially referencing the leakage that begs to exist outside of imposed demarcations. The puncturing of the paper with a needle and thread creates incisions — or scores — that evoke the violence embedded in systems of representation. The works are framed by metal armatures that serve as infrastructural delineations, but also allow viewers to navigate around, between, and through them. Throughout the installation, sound and film keep time at various paces, creating new frequencies that reverberate and make perceptible forms of interference.
Through this layering of gestures, Maksud composes both an elegy to the agony of embodied hegemony and a hopeful ode to future hybridities. worried notes provokes an awakening to the overlapping physical, spatial, and emotional traumas of colonial entanglement, and urges us to chart pathways of resistance to that which is known.
old blues, new bruises, embroidery on carbon paper, sand, light and sound installation, 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, complete with embroidery on carbon paper, sound and light. Historically, carbon paper was utilized to create copies from an original document or record. For the exhibition, this paper is used as both an instrument of replication and also one of abstraction. Using embroidery as a drawing tool to navigate the audible traces of African postcolonial histories, Maksud embroiders musical notations through the paper producing a double-sided document where on the one side you have replicated drawings from sheet music of various national anthems and on the other rhizomatic marks that operate in excess of these diagrammatic systems of knowledge. Here Maksud draws upon musical notation as a language to think through the traces and audible legacies of history and identity, particularly in relation to African independence.
Throughout the exhibition, Maksud draws parallels between audibility and legibility to consider the structures that continue to perpetuate a colonial order. Intervening within the architecture of the gallery is a new multi-channel sound installation composed of frequencies captured by an ETHER recorder which receives all the interference and radiation that a traditional radio tries to eliminate in order to create a clean signal. Here Maksud considers, how we can attune ourselves to pick up different frequencies, to feel what reverberates and hear what sounds at the margins? What might be a practice of decolonial listening? How might we tune out colonial sub frequencies that constantly hum in our ears? How might we hear beyond them or beneath them or perhaps hear another future?
Old blues new bruises is a continuation of a broader body of research on post-colonial subject formation through African national anthems. Listening back to these histories, Maksud considers the contradictions, failures and collapse of post-colonial hopes that prevailed during the early 1960s on the continent. Maksud’s practice traces these invisible structures and systems that construct and fix bodies in space and the violence embedded within systems of representation.
Light, Sound and Sculptural Installation, 8:00 mins looped sound 2022
They Try Their Tongues sonically considers transitions of political power and freedom as a constant struggle. Fragments of music from one African country that has changed its national anthem, as political power has shifted, three times since independence are embroidered into paper. 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.
Provisional Notes on Freedom, 2021, light, sound and sculptural installation, 15:00 mins looped sound.
Provisional Notes on Freedom is an immersive light, sound and sculptural installation that deconstructs notions of borders and boundaries. In my work, I think of national anthems sonic borders, but sound, as we know, is omni directional and cannot be contained. As such in this work I am interested in ideas based on leakage (as in sound leakage) and bleed (as in light build) and use them as a framework to think about notions excess.
Black Codes, Embossing on paper, 11 x 17 inches, 2021.
“Keli Safia Maksud’s work Black Codes,2021, examines the formalisms and the serial repetition through which responses to Black trauma are distilled across public media. Through embossing discursive forms of mediatized solidarity against a redacted backdrop, Maksud examines this default contemporary political aesthetics in, and for, public forums."
Text by Katherine C. M. Adams
Untitled Compositions, cyanotype and cyanotype dyed with mate tea, 15 x 21 inches, 2021.
This series of cyanotypes draws from diagrammatic systems of representation. I am interested in how line, form and shape is utilised to construct space and identity. These modalities of drawings albeit invisible to most, have been used to fix bodies in space and abstract land. As such, Untitled Compositions aims to transgress these systems of drawing, creating counter maps that resist legibility.
Untitled Anthem, 4-channel sound installation on prayer mat, 5’03, 2020. Link to Sound File.
Untitled Anthem is a deconstructed version of national anthem of Algeria, which is reflective of a military song. Here it is transformed into anthem with spiritual undertones that speaks instead to notions of communing. It is at once about the collective voice coming together and also individual reflection.
Anthems, 2019 - 2020, embroidery on paper, 9 x 12 inches (image shows the front and back).
Anthems explores national anthems that were composed and adopted in African countries post independence and points to the social and political complexity that is refracted through them and how western musical conventions were used to arrange them. As African nations sought independence, they too were motivated by the ethics of self-determination and composed new anthems which expose the contradictory and hybridic nature of postcolonial subject formation where self determination, both musically and linguistically, mirrored the former colonial powers while also speaking to the newly independent states. The resulting works in this series are drawings of micro fragments taken from sheet music of various national anthem and embroidered on paper resulting in a two sided document where on the one side you have the power structure of the score as evidence of the western facing identity while the back shows rhizomatic complex, nonlinear structures that expose relationships that aren’t happening in the embodiment of the national spirit that the front represents.
Faces of Africa, inkjet print, 52 x 75 inches, 2018.
Faces of Africa points to the ways in which electronic technologies affect the construction of identity and questions the material from which history is pictured and remembered. The images in this series are created by playing YouTube versions of Faces of Africa, a documentary series that highlights important figures and definitive moments in African histories, on an iPhone and placing it on a flatbed scanner which captures re-mediated historical moments in still image, resulting in artefacts of the technology revealing itself - prismatic distortions slurring movements and the passages of time in unpredictable ways. These documentaries mainly focus on the project of independence and unification by highlighting the life histories of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere, pointing to a moment of hope when the continent was undergoing rapid change in identity and representation. The resulting scanned still images however, are distorted, fragmented and at times, illegible just as those moments in history have become.
They also point to a moment of hope and a time when the continent was undergoing rapid change in identity and representation. The resulting scanned still images however, are distorted, fragmented and at times, illegible just as those moments in history have become.v
The Revolution Shall Not Be Televised, Mixed Media Installation (Erasers, Photographs, Sound, Video, Text and Masks), 2018
Completed as part of a residency at MMCA, Korea, The Revolution Shall Not Be Televised invites viewers to consider the forms of entanglement between nation- alist protest, the erasure of the female body in the memorial landscape of post-colonial histories, and the conditions under which these same bodies and images might once again reappear.
Unfinished Legacies is an ongoing, online project that investigates the ways in which Tanzania has constructed and mediated its national narrative, specifically the independence struggles which took place between 1945 - 1961. The project works towards destabilizing received histories by re-inscribing marginalized bodies into the national fragment.
Mitumba, mixed media installation (vlisco Hollandaise wax fabric, bleach, soap, and water), 2015.
Commissioned by 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil, Mitumba explores the dissemination of two European products within the continent of Africa: soap and printed African fabrics. Mitumba is a Swahili word that refers to packages of used clothing donated by people in wealthy countries. The installation utilises a circulation system developed specifically for this piece, that allows bleach to drop on to the bundle of fabrics over the course of three months. Simultaneously, the fabrics are also dyed in the process of bleaching because the same liquid is re-used creating a new hybrid form. The use of bleach, which historically has been used as a technology of social purification, is inextricably entwined with the semiotics of imperial racism and class denigration. Crossing generations, the works explores historical processes which were not pacified over time but instead are updated into new forms of control. While today these fabrics are quintessentially perceived as an expression of African authenticity, Mitumba points at the fabric’s continuous state of reinvention and regeneration. Within the context of social purification, the work references present day practices such as skin bleaching, which is rampant throughout the continent. As Hommi Bhabha has explained, “mimicry is a flawed identity imposed on colonized people who are obliged to mirror back an image of colonials but in imperfect form: “almost the same but not white.” Thus, this work seeks to evoke the tensions between local cultural expressions and foreign elements through poetry and metaphor.
Photos © Everton Ballardin
