is a Moroccan interdisciplinary artist and writer. Their work pivots around queerness, gender,abolition, race, labour, dreams, and Indigenous experiences. Kenza born in Casablanca, lives and works in Amsterdam. They studied Architectural Design (2015) at the Institute of public work in Casablanca, Morocco. and a master in Fine Arts (2023) from the Department of Ecologies of Transformation at Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.
Kenza creates a complex body of work interweaving paintings, installations, performances, rituals, poetry, storytelling, and video.
Their work crosses a wide range of fields with decolonial positions, de-gendering, queer perspectives, sexual liberation, and neo-socialist realism.
Both their personal and political narratives are articulately between North Africa, Europe, and other post-colonial 'destinations', especially vis-à-vis race/migration/gender/sex/labour/the queer experience within current capitalist neoliberal frame.
Kenza uses rituals, somatic practices, breathing rooms, ancestral knowledge, ancestral medicine, languages, and Amazigh traditions and practices.
This is how they build bridges and intervene in spaces across cultures and generations through both ancestral and contemporary tools, where to feel the feeling in hopes you can wrangle with that feeling or sit with what it means to observe a fact or situation.
Their act of making as well as their writing, which includes research, community conversations, exaggerated imagination, and speculating above the normative level, seem to be a way to open a window or space in-between—becoming dialogues within realism, analysis of themselves, and dialectical materialism's perception potential into work, creating space between-reflections, realism, works, and the world.
Through an engaging blend of text and cultural lineage pulled from ancestral and contemporary writing forms and designs, they use poetry, politics, language, painting, propaganda, and more as tools of resistance brought forth for the rehumanizing and reimagining of place and mind-othering.
Their work confronts the colonial gaze and provokes western perspectives, aiming to question and critique them from an artistic and mindful position. Kenza’s performances and visual pieces also address the violence against queer communities, communities of colour, and the working class under contemporary imperialist, colonial, classist, and patriarchal structures.
Kenza Badi's work Writings, installations, performances, and paintings has been shared and presented in the Netherlands, France, Spain, Belgium, Japan, England, Germany, the United States, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco.