Black Baroque Visiting Artist Interviews - Kajahl Benes

Through painting, contemporary artist Kajahl Benes resurrects objects that are lying dormant in historical archives. Kajahl’s portraits combine iconography from African, Asian, European, and Pre-Columbian traditions. He endlessly scours and sifts through books, online images and visits museums in order to gather source material. He takes these finds from his excavations and hybridizes entities that eventually become grandiose figures. Although the characters he constructs belong to a multiplicity of time periods , locations and cultures, they foreground the forgotten past and reanimate minor artifacts of history into what amounts to a transformative assemblage. For Kajahl, painting is a place where we can traverse different cultures and temporalities as a way to challenge our ideas about how we see ourselves and others. His work questions the boundaries of identity by treating painting as a site where radical mixtures, overlooked history and speculative fiction come into play. He is here in conversation with Dr. Cecilio M. Cooper, discussing his work and what Baroque iconography means to him.



Artist's work: https://www.artsy.net/artist/kajahl

Powerpoint of the presentation available here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KnCxH07-DAFLcF4uRFRy7Rg5sQyQVlE8/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116594373845038776272&rtpof=true&sd=true


Event originally held on Monday May 2, 2022 at the University of Chicago.


Interview facilitated by Dr. Cecilio M. Cooper (Forsyth Postdoctoral Research Fellow with University of Michigan’s History of Art Department) and Dr. Noémie Ndiaye (UChicago). Program management by Rachel Willis (UChicago).

Sponsored by the following University of Chicago entities:
Division of the Humanities
Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture