About

Hello,

My name
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.

About me
I make art, write, and work on different projects connected to a wide array of interests. It’s a bit challenging to place them all under a single umbrella, so here’s an incomplete list of some current things I’m exploring, or recently have explored:

How value is constructed, reified, and articulated
Art as a form of attention
People’s capacity to co-create meaning
Techniques to bridge the gap between art and life, conceptually, materially, experientially
How interfaces influence art-as-value, art-as-attention, and how we interact with the world at large.

I have made photographs, videos, sculpture, screen prints, performances, and installations. I find myself working with media whose logics, histories, and potentials contribute to the conceptual framework of my interests.

I am from Sunyani, in Ghana, and currently live in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. You might notice a slight focus on those regions in my work.

My approach
Like most contemporary artists, I draw from many lineages, but I am perhaps most greatly indebted to John Dewey, Alan Kaprow, Dada artists, and those other artists and theorists concerned with bridging art and life. I see my practice as further exploring this boundary, and wherever I can, piercing it.

Why? I believe, to paraphrase Dewey, that art can tell us something about how to understand and navigate life; that art can heighten certain latent aspects of being in the world. However, in order to do that, art cannot be isolated from life. I hope with my practice to contribute to an art ecosystem that is in dynamic conversation with lived experience, messy as it is, and to do this not just in the subjects I engage with, but in the aesthetic tendencies I demonstrate; that is, not simply to make political art, but to make art politically (h/t Goddard).

It would be nice, too, to have fun along the way— and to have fun with others! 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 if you’d like to chat.

Professional material
In no particular order, here are links to my:

CV (as Google doc)
Portfolio (as PDF)
Bio (Google doc; though I often prefer people contextually introduce me in their own words)
Headshots/photos (Google Drive)
Instagram
Email

About this website
This website hosts documentation of artworks I’ve made, and texts I’ve written. I’m working on adding links to projects I’ve contributed to. I also maintain a list of resources I’ve found helpful over the years. Hopefully, some might be useful for you too.

There’s also a colophon, an impressum, and copyright guidelines.

I try to update the website every month (alas, I often fail).

Hope you have fun rooting around here,

Blaykyi

Blaykyi Kenyah

Of Tension and Balance

2018 Plaster, acrylic

2018
Plaster, acrylic