Kazi’s work is instantly recognizable; not by processes of production, motifs or materials (which are exponentially expanding), but by a viscerally recognizable mode of how to hold things carefully and precisely. She constructs her work by drawing on an incarnated body memory, in relation to her diasporic background. The artist transposes memories interlacing the personal with the global through the mediums of writing, installation and performance.
The wall-objects created for Liste Art Fair Basel take the form of windows. Kazi describes the window as what becomes before a door in the most rudimentary of domestic spaces. A window is the removal of external wall that creates exchange with the outside world. A window is a tool that allows for visual and mental movement ahead of the physical. It is a frame and an obstacle. The domestic window is not a space for the crowd, it is for a single viewer in dialogue.
The wall-objects consist of painted and mirrored glass (a technique Kazi developed earlier this year), framed by a metal construction with security bars. Window security bars are found all over the Republic of the Congo. As they often indicate bright colors and ornaments, they become significant decorative elements of houses. Kazi will paint traces of inhabitants and their interiors onto the mirrored glass, and she will design the security bars in the form of interlacing crosses.
On the other hand, the sculptures, scattered around the floor, are titled Terre-plein, terres mères. They reinterpret the intention to construct a house as an act that transforms land into building lots. Bricks in cement and ceramic, the raw and the cooked, make up a half-finished work site, left abandoned. The work recalls the way Western construction techniques are imitated and adopted, in spite of local resources and knowhow. Similarly to the window security bars, Kazi lodged variations of different crosses inside the bricks. Eschewing the discourse of Christianity, these motifs evoke the multiple and simultaneous uses of a primary form at the intersection of various cults.
In this way, the works on view at Liste Art Fair Basel 2023 explore the emotional charge of objects of a no-longer-existent everyday, of movements, matter, architecture, as porous zones of contact, and traces of changing histories.
This project is supported by Pro Helvetia Schweizer Kulturstiftung
