Opening Reception | Keli Safia Maksud: worried notes

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.