KESSWASTUDIO@GMAIL.COM
BIOGRAPHY
ARTIST STATEMENT
CV
SELECTED WORK
MUSIC/MERCH
KESSWASTUDIO@GMAIL.COM
BIOGRAPHY
ARTIST STATEMENT
CV
SELECTED WORK
MUSIC/MERCH
2025
Co-Alchemy is a collaborative performance and multi-media exhibition produced by Ian John Solomon and KESSWA with support from Culture Source.
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2024
To mark the closing of her solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, KESSWA foregrounds social practice as a hair braider and fiber artist in a collaborative performance with New York-based writer and filmmaker Fatima Jamal.
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2023
On the occasion of Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit, a new travelling retrospective devoted to one of America’s most influential artists of the late twentieth-early twenty-first centuries at the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, Paris, Blank Forms presents a series of concerts reflecting the importance of music in the work of Kelley's work.
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2023
Transcendence uses virtual reality to consider liberatory movement, capturing landscapes and staging performances of joy and pleasure to capture the beauty of historically Black-owned land, specifically forefronting the experience of Black femmes. This exhibition reflects on the euphoric experiences of Black women affected by displacement because of the marginalization of women's voices during the retelling of this history. Transcendence calls for transgenerational recollections of the legacies of the freedom found in landscapes from the deep south to the Midwest.
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GOOGLE CREATORS LAB SEASON 7, TEXAS ISAIAH COLLABORATION
NEW YORK CITY, USA
2023
"I May Not See Myself as Others See Me Not" witnesses Detroit-based Nigerian interdisciplinary artist KESSWA as they perform facets of themself. KESSWA embodies the priestess, the neophyte, the medium, the time traveler, and KESSWA, the warrior. KESSWA developed these aspects in their artist's childhood through vivid dreams and adulthood through ancestral reverence, which tend to fall behind the artist's subconscious, also referred to as the veil.
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2021
An experimental afro-surrealist narrative short about “KESSWA,” a neophyte and unrealized artist, who, while on vacation from work, visits a mystical hotel in the city of Detroit and ends up trapped in her mind, on a seemingly endless loop.
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2021
Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2021, “Is My Mind a Machine Gun?” is titled after an excerpt from Assata Shakur's poem “What is Left?” The film, which premiered on the museum's new media platform, Daily Rush, is a collaborative response to COVID-19's global impact on society and the urgency for self-reflection, love, and connection during a time of unprecedented uncertainty.
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2021
In this performance of Sense of Urgency, KESSWA and Shigeto begin in a shared meditative posture, kneeling face-to-face on stage as a sustained synthesizer drone establishes the work’s sonic foundation. This opening functions as a preparatory ritual, orienting both performers and audience toward the unfolding soundscape.
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