My name is Blaykyi Kenyah (pronounced Blay-chee Kay-nya; the ‘ny’ sound might be unfamiliar to some of you; it’s like the ‘ny’ in canyon).
Welcome to my website.
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About me
I make art, write, and involve myself in a number of projects.
I think from browsing this website, my preoccupations will soon become apparent, but for sake of completeness, here is an incomplete list of some of things I’m currently exploring, or have explored recently:
- Value— how it is constructed, how it is reified, how it is communicated
- Art as a specific form of attention
- The gap between high ‘art’ and low ‘life’, and the transubstantiation of everyday objects into artworks
- How the technologies of art engagement manufacture and/or edit the total nature of the artwork.
- People’s capacity to co-create meaning
- Art as experience, in Dewey’s sense
My artistic practice is how I work through these, and other, ideas. I have in the past made photographs, (very short) videos, sculptures, screenprints, ‘happenings’, and installations, and I am interested in these media as technologies with logics, histories, and futures in their own rights too.
I write to lay out my questions and thoughts and to shape communities of like-minded people. My projects are how I move the world closer to the world I want to live in.
Throughout all these, I have, at least now, two explicit goals: first, to comprehend a social world that remarkably strange, at least from my vantage point, and to enact, in the way I move through the world, a position that demonstrates my belief in the tight connection between aesthetic, ethics, and politics; that to make art politically is to make art of certain [aesthetic] tendencies. It would be nice to have on the way too.
I’m originally from Sunyani, and currently live in Frankfurt; you might notice in my projects a geographic focus on the regions in which these are towns located.
I’m always looking for opportunities to collaborate on projects, artistic or not, and just really enjoy talking to people doing things even tangentially connected to my interests, so please don’t hesitate to reach out via email or instagram direct messages (fair warning, I try to limit my instagram visits to once a week).
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Professional material
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About this website
Here you can find documentation of different art projects I have been a part of, texts I have written, and projects I am involved in.
This website also hosts a list of book recommendations, links to other web pages I think you might be interested in, and my Instagram account.
The colophon gives you some more information about the website, and the impressum on who is responsible for it. I’ve also detailed copyright guidelines on a separate page.
I try to update the website at the end of every month (I often fail, alas).
Thank you for visiting, and please feel free to reach out if anything interests you!