Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa' (the water is rising)

Saif Azzuz: Keet Hegehlpa’ (the water is rising) interrogates the privatization of land, water, and natural resources within settler-colonial systems. Across a range of mediums, Saif Azzuz (b. 1987, Pacifica, California) references the myths, origin stories, and fabricated tales animating the land we now call Houston. The exhibition brings together site-specific and newly commissioned installations, paintings, and assemblage. Along with family members, Lulu Thrower, Viola Azzuz, Moya Azzuz, and Colleen Colegrove, the artists in the exhibition draw ecological knowledge to visualize histories of land stewardship and rematriation practices that gesture to Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance—the conjunction between resistance and survival.

For the artist’s first museum exhibition, Azzuz draws upon historicized fictions in archives and material histories. Through close examination, the artist locates seemingly unrelated historical processes that contribute to the loss of agency or autonomy in the land and body, which points to commonalities, contradictions and shared precariousness across communities. In Keet Hegehlpa’, the artist employs archival references, such as Allen Brothers advertisements that circulated in the early 19th century, which depicted an idyllic hilly European hamlet known as Buffalo Bayou. These manufactured misrepresentations encouraged settlers to purchase and occupy the unceded land of the Sana, Atakapa-Ishak, Akokisa, and Karankawa peoples. Through painting and assemblage, Azzuz responds to the control of stolen land and carceral realities to discuss how privatization is enforced. Azzuz’s work offers strategies of subversion against continued attempts to control or displace Indigenous communities; in so doing, the artist centers the unyielding and interconnected force of life in all beings—human and more-than-human alike.

Saif Azzuz (b. 1987, lives and works in Pacifica, CA) received a bachelor's degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Azzuz has exhibited at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, FR; ICA San Francisco, CA; Pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; and K Art, Buffalo, NY. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including Rennie Museum, de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gochman Family Collection, Facebook, North Carolina Museum of Art, University of St. Thomas, Stanford Health Care Art Collection and UBS Art Collection.