Keioui Keijaun Thomas

Prounouns: She/Her

April 2022

Keioui Keijaun Thomas (b. 1989, based in Brooklyn, New York) creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. The materials employed by Thomas function as tools, objects, and structures to compose a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Through movement and matter, Thomas deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of black bodies in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, reciting her own poetry and slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. Thomas underscores the endurance and intimacy that care work demands from those expected to perform it — predominantly black women, black femmes, and people of color. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding, and community, to create safer spaces for black people and people of color. Thomas is the inaugural winner of the Queer|Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists and the Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient for 2018. She earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Thomas has presented work nationally and internationally at ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland (2019); Fierce Festival, Birmingham, Uk (2019); MoCA Skopje, Skopje, Macedonia (2020); Creamcake Festival, Berling, Germany (2021); The Rhubarb Festival, Toronto, Canada (2020); Time Based Arts Festival, Portland, Oregon (2016); Dweller Festival, Brooklyn, NY (2020); Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, Chicago, IL (2016); SPILL Festival of Performance, Ipswich, UK (2014); Out of Site Festival, Chicago, IL (2014). Solo Performances at Housing NY, Brooklyn, NY (2016); The Knockdown Center, New York, NY (2018), Performance Space UK, Folkestone, UK (2016); Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2015). Selected group exhibitions held at Broad Museum, Los Angeles, CA ( 2017); Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, TX (2018); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2018); Perrotin Gallery, New York (2022), New York, NHuman Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2019); Performance Space, New York, NY (2019); Wrightwood 659, Chicago, IL (2019); Artist Space, New York, NY (2018); EXPO Chicago, Chicago, IL, (2015); Links Hall, Chicago, IL (2014); Montréal, arts interculturels (MAI), Montreal, Quebec (2019); The Knockdown Center, New York, NY (2017); Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, France (2015); Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Defibrillator Performance Gallery, Chicago, IL (2013); Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (2018); Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2018; ISSUE Project Room, New York, NY (2018), Performatorium 5, Saskatchewan, Regina, Canada (2016); New Normal, Istanbul, Turkey & Beirut, Lebanon (2017); Encuentro 2016, Santiago, Chile (2016); and Centro Cultural del México Contemporaneo, México City (2016).

Image Credits:

Film Still by Charles Rice

Film Still by Christopher Sonny Martinez

Photo by Rikki Porter

Photo by Luis Nieto Dickens