Kesh is a multifaceted British artist whose creative prowess transcends the realms of visual art, music, and fashion. She first established her artistic voice through acclaimed international solo exhibitions and most recently showcased some of her artwork at the Ki Smith Gallery in New York for their Poetry & Pose: Screen Test by Andy Warhol exhibition.

Beyond fine art, Kesh is a DJ who joined pop star Anitta on her 2022 Summer Tour, an art director and photographer who produced the Good American 2022 campaign with 90s powerhouse group TLC, and so much more.

Her work defies conventions, seamlessly melding creative technology with experimental soundscapes. We spoke to Kesh about her most recent exhibition, an experience that profoundly influenced her artistic perspective, and the worst advice she’s ever received. 

What initially inspired you to combine various artistic practices, such as visual art, music, design, and fashion?

Kesh: It happened very naturally. I’ve always had a creative mind and experimented with multiple mediums. I wanted to do fashion design, but I also had a deep passion and interest in music. The visual art evolved through applying my artworks to clothing, then broke off into its own expression as I gained exposure to Fine Art. My love of music allowed me to build a personal musical archive that spans many genres, which I apply to DJing and later music production, which has been a beautiful journey. Although I was encouraged to choose one path, it wasn’t possible. I explored all mediums and built in each area as I moved forward.

What came first for you: music, visual art, design or fashion?

Kesh: It’s hard to say. All were in flow at the same time. As a young child, I would collect a lot of music and play specific songs on repeat, obsessing over the rhythm and production of a track. But at the same time, I’d make little outfits for my Barbies and put on fashion shows. I studied ballet and gymnastics and wanted to maybe become a ballerina one day. However, once I was told there weren’t many opportunities for ‘Black ballerinas’, it shifted my perspective, and I think since I was already such a hyper-creative, I decided to choose something that wasn’t so front-facing. Now that I think about it, it’s pretty sad that I had to make those kinds of pivots at 14, but ultimately, my passions were spread across many mediums anyway.

My first real step as an independent artist was in design. I was drawing on clothing, creating artwork I would print onto t-shirts and sell online. I would create my own little worlds and continuously expand upon the vision. But simultaneously, I was beginning to DJ, making my artwork, creative directing, and being a fashion editor at an underground magazine, so I’ve always been a jack of all trades. It’s hard to say what my first artistic love was – I think it was just creating in general.

“It’s hard to say what my first artistic love was. I think it was just creating in general” – Kesh

Can you tell us more about exhibiting your work and performing at the Ki Smith Gallery, alongside unique screen tests by Andy Warhol, and what that experience meant to you?

Kesh: Honestly, this was one of the top five moments of my life. It was such an incredible experience to create a world within an Andy Warhol exhibition and move through my many mediums within one show. I created an experience that focuses on my process as an artist, exploring previous series and shows, creating new live works, and performing new unreleased music on stage. We displayed 26 artworks from my previous shows and personal archives, which were also available to collect. It was a huge undertaking and took a large team to execute since there were many moving parts. Still, it unfolded beautifully as everybody’s contribution of time, energy, focus, and passion helped build an incredible experience. 

I say it’s one of the top five moments of my life because I feel that this was the first time I had covered every area of my artistic and creative expression in one show. Usually, it’s compartmentalised in ways – a visual art show, a live music performance, a clothing release, a DJ set, or a live drawing — but that night, it was everything. All together. All at once. And for me, that was healing. I felt complete like all my puzzle pieces had finally been together.

Can you describe a moment or experience that profoundly influenced your artistic perspective or direction?

Kesh: The passing of my friend Ian changed me a lot. He was an incredible producer that went by the name of ‘Napolian’ and we made a lot of work together. Beyond our friendship, we intensely focused on music and spent many hours working on it. I would produce these beats, write these songs, and then collaborate with Ian to evolve them into insane tunes. I can’t count how many hours we were in the studio, fully locked in. I have a pretty solid sound in terms of my production, and so did Ian, so when we combined our worlds, we made beautiful work. But we never released any of it. Not a single track.

I’ve mentioned in previous interviews that music is a really vulnerable place for me. I’m used to expressing myself through imagery, so when it comes to sonic frequencies and sharing my voice and words, I feel slightly nervous about putting them out. It wasn’t about what people thought of me, but it was just that I wasn’t used to being so open. So, I would subconsciously find ways never to finish or put the work out.

Ian would always encourage me to be less afraid and to learn to let go of the music and let it enter the world. But I couldn’t. A few years later, I put out a track or two of my own, ‘Not Gaan Out’ and ‘Jadines Escape’, then we hopped on a call and said let’s work on some new stuff together. I sent him some beats and songs I’d made, and we were excited to lock back in. He died shortly after that.

That changed a lot in my life. Ian was young, in his twenties. His sudden passing had a profound effect on me, especially artistically. I know he had so many goals, dreams, and projects that never came to life, and it was a wake-up call for me not to be so caught up in it all. To let go, like he told me. His positive words and attitude inspire me, and I think of him often. I do this for myself, but I also do this for him and the other friends and artists I have lost who never got to see their dreams come to life fully.

What’s the last text you sent?

Kesh: ‘I just wanna do the eclipse and chill’ – me to my babes, Alexa Demie.

What’s your love language?

Kesh: Physical touch. I’m super affectionate to the people I’m close to, and I love cuddles and snuggles with my friends. If I feel safe with you, I’ll be like a kitty cat.

What fictional character do you most relate to and why?

Kesh: Harry Potter because he was an orphan who grew up feeling unwanted and unloved. He then took risks, faced challenges, conquered darkness, and eventually made a nice life for himself. It’s basically my life but in a slightly different format.

You encounter a hostile alien race and sound is their only mechanism for communication. What song would you play to them to inspire them to spare you and the rest of the human race?

Kesh: It’s either that ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole to chill everyone out and settle down the situation, or I’d pull up some CDs and throw on the heaviest hardcore hardstyle track and getting a rager going because who can deny a big banger? I’d have to read the mood and the vibe of the hostile alien race, but those are my two options.

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?

Kesh: Just choose one thing and do that.

Do we live on in photographs; can they offer us a kind of immortality? Or do we figuratively die the moment our photograph is taken, after which the image painfully recapitulates death itself? Perhaps the photographed subject occupies a space between the two, not quite alive, not quite dead.

These are just some of the questions that arise in the work of New York photographer Peter Hujar, whose series Portraits in Life and Death is currently showing in Europe for the first time. Walk through the rooms of the exhibition at the 60th Venice Biennale and you’ll run into some familiar faces; John Waters, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz and William Burroughs are among those Hujar photographed in his studio, all of whom were his friends. But the show offers more than a hall of fame. Alongside the portraits of celebrities are those of lesser-known figures from Hujar’s 1970s Lower East Side artistic milieu, captured in intimate states of repose and vulnerability, as well as a haunting set of images taken a decade earlier, in the early 60s, of embalmed bodies in the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy.

That these photos of eerie and entombed remains sit alongside the black and white portraits of contemporaries was Hujar’s intention; he placed the two series side by side in his first and only monograph, also titled Portraits in Life and Death, published in 1976. Hujar’s friend, the writer and critic Susan Sontag wrote in the book’s introduction, “Photography … converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also – wittingly or unwittingly – the recording angels of death. We no longer study the art of dying … but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably.”

We often think of death as the great equaliser. We all die eventually. One of the most striking images in Hujar’s collection – a masked corpse that appears to be laughing, and the cover image for the monograph – seems to make this point. Yet the reality presents a more complicated picture. Death may be accelerated for those without the means to stave it off through access to the right healthcare, as the untimely death of many of Hujar’s subjects illustrates. There is also the question of who is granted the privilege of remembrance. Take the catacombs where Hujar photographed the mummified bodies, which attest to this uncomfortable fact: the people preserved there were well-known or elite figures who could afford to pay for the embalming process and to be kept on view.

“The catacombs were created for the elite to remain as lifelike as possible, a space for visitation and remembrance,” explains the Venice show’s curator, Grace Deveney. “In those photos, Hujar is drawn to bodies in frames and set up for display. The catacombs were an early way of thinking about photography’s unique possibility to bring life and death together and fix them through these momentary glimpses. When he turns to portraiture he is capturing people with a sense of impending death in life.”

Like the catacomb photos, with their coffins and encasements, in his studio portraits, Hujar’s frame appears to encapsulate and hold his subjects, often as tenderly as they had just died in his arms. Some later did; one image in the show features James Waring, a dancer who died in his fifities, with Hujar taking care of him. Other images Hujar later took (not present in the Venice show) include an image of Warhol superstars Jackie Curtis – after death from a heroin overdose – and Candy Darling, on her deathbed before she passed away from lymphoma at just 29 (an image that later became an album cover for Anohni and The Johnsons).

When Hujar himself was hospitalised in 1987 from Aids-related illness, the artist David Wojnarowicz, Hujar’s former lover, turned the photographer’s camera around, capturing Hujar for posterity, as though not only to complete the Portraits In Life and Death series, but to document the grave tragedy and injustice of the ongoing Aids crisis. Look hard enough at Hujar’s portraits, and you might discern a knowing look in his subjects that seems to foreshadow how Aids would ravage the landscape of the East Village, taking the lives of this network of mostly queer performers and artists that Hujar surrounded himself with.

Although many of Hujar’s subjects are people of note, Deveney suggests “he was not drawn to photographing famous people” but – as Hujar himself put it – “those who push themselves to any extreme […] and people who cling to the freedom to be themselves.” Dancers and people with dynamic practices were a draw, says Deveney, referencing portraits of Kenneth King, a dancer and choreographer, and Larry Reed of the Trocadero dance troupe. “I think he photographed them in these moments of rest, not moments of performance, because he was interested less in performers on stage or as public facing artists but as people who, outside of the image, can do this extraordinary, transformational or transgressive thing.”

Speaking to AnOther, photography critic Vince Aletti (and a friend of Hujar’s), agreed that Hujar was not preoccupied with fame. Besides the fact that many of his subjects were not yet famous at the time their portrait was taken, Aletti remembers Hujar himself as an aloof person, wary of mainstream success, and interested in cultivating authentic relationships – both with those in his personal life and with his sitters, who were often one and the same. “Peter rarely photographed people that he didn’t care about. [He] waited for them to let go, rather than giving him their ‘camera face’,” recalls Aletti.

The irony is, however, that the more famous portraits have in part, contributed to Hujar’s recent recognition in the art world and among those with an interest in queer archives and histories. Ten years ago Hujar may not have been recognisable, despite his distinct good looks (best captured in his own mesmerising self-portrait). Now, with the Venice show, and a reissue of the book Portraits In Life and Death forthcoming in October 2024, things are  changing. Soon, the actor (and two-time Another Man cover star) Ben Whishaw will play Hujar in a film biopic. Little known beyond his immediate circles and barely earning a dime during his lifetime, today – long after his death – Hujar is becoming a photography superstar revered for his formal expertise and distinct ability to see into a subject’s soul.

This brings us back to the question of who is and isn’t remembered, and Hujar’s fascination with how photography can play an intervening role. As Roland Barthes put it: “In an initial period, photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs.”

Portraits in Life And Death by Peter Hujar is on show at Istituto Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice until 24 November 2024.