Asé Selah

Asé Selah is an interdisciplinary artist and graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work explores Black Space as a site of agency, transformation, and resistance. At the core of his practice is an investigation into how Blackness is often rendered through linear, colonial narratives—and how painting, performance, and interdisciplinary art allow for more expansive, embodied, and truthful representations of Black life within space.

Asé’s research asserts that when we speak of Black Space, we must also examine power: who holds it, who grants access to it, and how agency operates once space is supposedly “given.” He considers the Black body as a critical site—where struggle, ritual, memory, and imagination converge. His work interrogates how Black bodies are not only shaped by space, but also reshape and reclaim it through acts of resistance, creativity, and care.

Grounded in spatial theory, phenomenology, and Pan-Africanist thought, Asé’s practice challenges the imposed limits on Black presence. Themes of erasure, containment, presence, and becoming run throughout his work. He argues that Black Space is not marginal or abstract—it is a world-building force. Through material reclamation, discourse analysis, and artistic intervention, Asé creates spaces where Black visibility is not negotiated, but affirmed.

In this vision, Black Space is not static. It is fluid, sovereign, and infinite.