Catalogue > At random

I Remember When I Was A Soldier is an experiment of memory put together through a collage of archival footage and sound taken from various war museums in the US and Britain. While in these archives, there exist overlaps and discontinuities that connect, through a lack of subjectivity, different non-white bodies, this work attempts to reconstruct the history of the millions of Africans who fought as soldiers during the WWII for the British. As Stuart Hall notes in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, the European presence is that which in visual representation has positioned the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation: the colonial discourse, the literatures of adventure and exploration, the ethnographic and travelling eye, the violent, pornographic languages of urban violence. Presence Europeenne is about exclusion, imposition and expropriation. As such, this work puts together a non-linear argument for how we perceive history and attempts to forge a new language about the WWII.

Keli Safia Maksud (b. 1985) is Kenyan-Tanzanian-Muslim-Christian visual artist based in Nairobi and Toronto. Concerned with the histories of the colonial encounter and its effects on memory, Maksud’s interdisciplinary practice uses multiple voices, rather than one narrator, to work towards destabilizing received histories about “African” identities. Maksud graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2007 and her works have been shown in galleries and venues in Kenya, South Korea, Brazil, Canada and the United States.