KESSWASTUDIO@GMAIL.COM
BIOGRAPHY
ARTIST STATEMENT
CV
SELECTED WORK
MUSIC/MERCH
KESSWASTUDIO@GMAIL.COM
BIOGRAPHY
ARTIST STATEMENT
CV
SELECTED WORK
MUSIC/MERCH
TRINOSOPHES
Originally performed on April 26, 2026, at Trinosophes in Detroit, Michigan, 1139 LETY'S
emerged from Kelechi Agwuncha and Kesiena “KESSWA” Wanogho's final collaborative performance as artists-in-residence at Modern Ancient Brown Foundation (Detroit, Michigan).
In this durational performance and installation, Nigerian-American artists kelechi and Kesiena cut one another's hair while transforming the sound of hair clippers into a live noise composition. Positioned within a spiritual cosmogram composed of musical cords and beside a shared altar of Nigerian ephemera, they engage in this process as ceremony.
Using contact microphones attached to the clippers and processed through effects units, they construct a sonic ritual accompanied by performing drum machines, synthesizers, and spoken readings from Amiri Baraka's poem “The Measure of Memory”. Together, these elements create an immersive soundscape that reimagines the haircut as both a communal act of care and a performative gesture of renewal.
The performance draws on the history of their Modern Ancient Brown artist-in-residence building (Detroit, Michigan), a former hair salon called “Lety’s Cuts-N-Style.” The origin story of the site invokes a lexicon of Detroit’s most robust creative tradition—Black hair styling—a creative expression of mutual care and benefit that gathers a range of ontologies about Black surviving and thriving. Through the
practice of “site responsiveness”—studying and remarking about Black labor production.
Kesiena and kelechi grappled with the complexities of upholding ceremonial space in their artwork while engaging with an art industry that continues to celebrate mass production, capital-oriented success, and corporate supremacy: a creative economy increasingly void of artists’ hands and the intimacy between artists, their subjects, and their audiences.
Kesiena and kelechi’s performance is a prologue: an invitation to consider how spiral time, sonic polyrhythms, ceremonial labor, and sacred repetition can foster opportunities for
deep fellowship and other value sets beyond capital. Drawing on their respective practices in fiber, moving image, and sound, kelechi agwuncha and Kesiena Wanogho present a performance installation that engages their overlapping queries and interests in their practices as they relate to Black temporalities, mundane ritual acts, spiral time, and contemporary art economies.
In this performance, they also each relate their personal ties to hair culture. kelechi's interest in hair as a ritual of care stems in part from family history. Their aunt owns three hair salons in Lagos, Nigeria, where she first began documenting haircuts with a camcorder. This curiosity later expanded to filming outdoor barber pop-ups on Chicago's South Side, quotidian haircut rituals among friends, and scanning cosmetology archives
and beauty manuals. Footage and archives gathered through these experiences have become source material for live video mixes she’s performed at Pitchfork Music Festival (Chicago, IL), Midwaste Space Peoples (Chicago, IL), Garage Theatre (Detroit, MI), and other performance spaces, shaping an ongoing exploration of hair as a site of intimacy.