Kaya (Kerstin Braetsch & Debo Eilers)

KAYA collaboratively traverse the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing both genres into an altogether new, hybrid artistic approach. Containers for a kind of inter-subjectivity that both retains and sublimates the artists’ individual hands, the works also offer a geologic logic, an organic history of their own making, as they preserve and pulverize or retool the former KAYA performance objects and ephemera into upcoming works, and re-use from KAYA’s past into a multiple, ever-becoming body. More recently KAYA has moved beyond the figure of Kaya Serene and has become a collaborative platform that reaches beyond the artistic output of “Brätsch and Eilers” to incorporate the creative energies of the community that it builds around itself for each iteration of the project. Often times this includes fellow artists, as well as students, curators, academics, and the institution that plays host to the many KAYA projects. KAYA is a collaborative project established by painter Kerstin Brätsch (b. 1979, Hamburg, Germany) and sculptor Debo Eilers (b. 1974, Texas, USA) in 2010.