Kiki Salem Artist Talk

Join us for an artist talk with Kiki Salem as she discusses her solo exhibition confronting loss and preservation in a time of ethnic cleansing through generational crafts, personal and community archives, and immersive installations. She will also present a new loom weaving created collaboratively with community, reflecting her practice of shared testimony, resilience, and the urgent work of memory and imagination under erasure.

Kiki Salem (b. 1995, Al-Bireh, Palestine) is a St. Louis-based artist who combines ancient visual patterns and traditional craft to create vibrant hybridized works. Born to a Palestinian father and a Palestinian-Brazilian mother, her multicultural, multilingual, transcontinental upbringing has informed an art practice that transcends and accompanies commonality. Through an experimental approach to material and color, she is able to reimagine textile and architectural design from the Arab/Muslim world into sculptural weavings, large-scale murals, tapestry, animation, tattoo, and print. Her wearable graphic project, PunkAssArab, has allowed her to reach a global audience through the exploration of the Arabic language and themes central to the Arab diasporic experience. Kiki is a member of the Screwed Arts Collective in St. Louis. She has taught Palestinian Tatreez workshops at UCLA, the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited at the St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cue Art Foundation in New York, SpaceHub in Birzeit, and will be included in the upcoming exhibitions Guiding Ethos at the Trout Museum of Art and Deviant Ornaments at the National Museum in Oslo. Her work has also been featured in Hyperallergic, Vogue, GQ Middle East, Southern Graphics Council International (SGCI), Middle East Monitor, and The Brooklyn Rail.

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