Keren Lasme is an artist, writer and literary curator based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and working around the world. She holds an MA in African Studies from SOAS University of London with a major in African Philosophy.

She describes herself as an aesthete and a storyteller who uses art to explore the Self and communicate her inner landscapes. Her work and visual language are meant to elevate the spirit and to calm the mind.

Through photography, collage, video art, installations, writing, design and performance, Keren reclaims the dreamscape and shares fragments of wonder, beauty and mystery.

Keren’s research and practice is concerned with mythopoetic identity formation, knowledge activation and the use of fiction and imagination as spatio-temporal technologies to conjure better presents and futures. She is interested in alternative spaces of (un)(re)learning as dreamscapes and playgrounds to negotiate freedom, healing, revelation and reconfiguration of social imaginaries. Kokoba: Meeting our griots / À la Rencontre de nos griots, a cultural project for which she won the 2021 Prince Claus Seed Award embodies this framework. It also engages with educational theory, the politics of care and pleasure while using the collective memories and imagination archived in African literatures as praxis.

iéfo - the vessel through which she create objects and adornments inspired by Africa’s material and immaterial cultures - explores ways of making that are rooted in intentionality, slowness and soulfulness.

Keren is a Fellow of Per°Form Open Academy of Arts, Ideas and Activations in Singapore. She was also a finalist of Ellipse Art Projects 2022.