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 the Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Seoul, Galería Nueva and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.
Education
MFA, 2021
Columbia University: Visual Arts
Diploma, 2019
The New Centre for Research & Practice: Art and Curatorial Practice
Bachelor of Fine Arts, 2007
Ontario College of Art and Design: Drawing and Painting
Exhibitions
2025: Smack Mellon, New York
2024: Hope is a discipline, Govenors Island, New York
2024: worried notes, CUE Art Foundation, New York
2023: Contact Zone, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York
2023: old blues, new bruises, AIR Gallery, New York
2023: Notes from Below, ACUD Gallery, Berlin
2022: A different now is close enough to exhale on you, Goodman Gallery, South Africa
2022: Caldonia, Salon 94, New York
2022: Tempus Fugit, LatchKey Gallery, New York
2022: ALTER, 12 Gates Gallery, Philadelphia
2022: Galerie Kandlhofer, Austria
2021: Time Won’t Tell, Project Gallery V, New York
2021: The sis, Lenfest Centre for the Arts, New York
2021: Countercapture, Miriam Gallery, New York
2021: I Belong To This, Huxley-Parlour, London, England
2021: The Artists Are In, Hercules, New York
2021: Art 52nd Street, Chungbuk National University, South Korea
2021: Year One, Wallach Gallery, New York
2020: SP-Foto Art Fair, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2020: 5 AÑOS DE ATELIER SOLAR, Cruce Arte y Pensamiento Contemporáneo, Madrid, Spain
2020: Aquí África, Galeía Nueva, Madrid, Spain
2019: Streams of Consciousness: Bamako Encounters - African Biennale of Photography, Mali
2018: Art of Things, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art - Seoul, South Korea
2015: Mitumba, 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil || Southern Panoramas, Brazil
Curatorial Experience
2016 A Spectacle of Privacy and Mondial 2010, Roy Dib, A Space Gallery, April 6 – May 7 2016, Toronto, Canada.
Grants and Awards
2023: Foundation for the Arts
2023: Canada Council for the Arts
2022: Orange Tangent Study
2021: NYFA City Arts Corps, New York
2018 & 2017: Canada Council for the Arts
2015: Toronto Art Council: Media Arts Projects
2014 & 2012: Ontario Arts Council
Fellowships and Residencies
2024: Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art
2024: ISCP Pollock Krasner Foundation
2022: Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture
2022: SIP Fellowship at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop Program, New York
2021: Hercules Studio Art Program, New York
2019: Atelier Solar, Madrid, Spain
2018: National Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art Korea
2016: Kovu Safarini, Nairobi, Kenya
Collections
Associação Cultural Videobrasil
Northwestern University
Atelier Solar, Madrid, Spain