Keli Safia Maksud

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My practice investigates the intersections of space, identity, and power as enduring legacies of colonialism. Working across installation, drawing, sculpture, sound, and embroidery, my works explore diagrammatic systems of representation emerging from architecture, cartography, spatial planning, and music (specifically, national anthems), calling attention to how space and time are ordered. On the one hand, these systems are communicative tools used to realize concepts and ideas into material construction, and on the other, tools that regulate, surveil, and enact an architecture that governs how bodies move through space. I am interested in the standardization that such systems present as unitary languages of homogeneous experience and how those whose experience falls outside such constructions of sameness are denied and othered by and in it. Central to my research is a consideration of the “line” as the substrate of all these systems, enforcing and rearticulating binaries like inside/outside, here/there, and us/them. I aim to disrupt and reconfigure these colonial structures by “breaking the line”—a gesture that challenges the epistemological supports that legitimize and secure the violent reproduction of enclosures of captivity and the nation-state model. Through this process, my work unsettles spatial and temporal constructs, opening up possibilities for alternative ways of being, moving, and relating to space and to one another.