At The Last Sky
At The Last Sky
Oct 3rd -
Dec 13th, 2025
The Luminary is pleased to present At The Last Sky, aN exhibition OF NEW work BY St. Louis-based Palestinian artist Kiki Salem
Opening Reception: Oct 3rd, 2025 from 6-9pm
The Luminary is pleased to present its fall exhibition, At The Last Sky, featuring new work by St. Louis-based Palestinian artist Kiki Salem, on view from Oct 3rd to Dec 13, 2025.
At the Last Sky demands a collective meditation on what is lost and what must be preserved at a time of ethnic cleansing. Kiki Salem reiterates the exigency of personal and collective testimonies as a response to state-sanctioned necrosis. Employing generational tactile traditions like carpet making, Tatreez, the preparation of family meals, and private enshrinements, Salem’s practice embodies acts against forgetting and erasure, coalescing grief and joy, mourning and resilience. Uncovering portals while circumnavigating the destruction of built environments, razor-fences once rebuilt from the ground up are now sky-down in a central large-scale central installation, Birds of Paradise, 2025. Ascending from a prayer mat to Qibla, gauze and razor rugs stitch and divide filial lineages, further cleaved by genocide. A large-scale analog Tatreez wall of memories places the artist’s private archive in full view, in a kind of fearless anarchism that situates Salem’s politics beyond an intellectual, activist frame. Pulling her pendulum back to the center of the heart as a gravitational motivational tool, Salem attempts to stabilize a diaspora under siege through transparent acts of sharing and generosity.
Encoding geographic displacement stitch by stitch; repetition, pattern, and knotting become a means for transmitting generational knowledges from hand to heart. Oral histories, secrets, fears, and confessions carry on the wind as the artist traveled between her hometown of Beitin and her current home in St. Louis, over the making of this show. Extending her route through Masafer Yatta, Jenin Refugee Camp, Amman, Havana, and Santa Clara, Cuba, Salem repeatedly returns visitors to imperialist lands as a form of decolonial critique. Working as a multicultural, transcultural, autonomous activist and lateral community organizer, Salem is characteristically careful of the politics of individualism. In fact, as an artist for whom collectivity is central to practice, translating free, strong, willful assertions into a maximalist material study, Salem absorbs her own desires into the desires of the group, assuming responsibility for her own freedoms and oppressions. Creating multitudes, much like the presentation of three recent paintings, Wala3at no.1 (It’s lit), 2024; Wala3at no.2 (It’s lit), 2025; and If this place existed, they’d ______ it too, 2025, presented on an intimate sea-foam and sun-yellow textile wall, Salem brawls with disciplinary boundaries by rooting her approach in communal craft etymologies.
Each material in At the Last Sky rejects any form of neutrality. Razor wires embody enclosures and the separation she feels from her homeland. Gauze (from the Arabic word Ghazza) evokes healing in tending to externally inflicted wounds. A tapestry, I Can’t Breathe When I Think About Gaza, 2024, composed of woven textiles, coins, and brass bullet shells, serves as a monument to issues of everyday corpomateriality and the politics of vulnerability in the long-term pursuit of resistance. Being perceived as a “coming of age”, “woman”, “punk”, “diasporic”, “Arab”, “other”, Salem resists classifications to focus on the transmission and dispersal of desires of the collective. Holding tensions between fragility and force, presence and erasure, spectral monuments contain and disperse the artist’s grief to acknowledge the persistence of survival as a condition of collectivity. A death in one land reverberates across oceans, setting off a chain reaction of violences, within and without.
A landscape site-specific installation, يوم عسل، يوم بصل, Youm 3asal, youm basal, some days are honey, some days are onions, 2025, plays with different levels of digital and analog dynamics. High saturation breathing patterns flash across color and black and white CRT screens, enacting systemic power relations between broadcast images and the susceptibility of mass viewership. As endless streams of images of death and destruction strip our imagination of a living, breathing culture, Salem uses technology to structurally rebuild a sightline of mountains, desert dunes, and ocean waves. Placing monitors at different levels to mobilize paradigmatic readings of pattern as pleasure, the social memorialization of pain, and algorithmic trends on newsfeeds, the artists personal memory and recollection become a direct force against political and economic domination. The flicker of tapes, bleeds of Technicolor, and grainy texture of analog remind viewers that images are not purely content nor information but fragile records, constantly subject to decay and distortion.
At the Last Sky is not a show about craft. It is about generational knowing, speaking, and writing at a time of genocide to shake the dust of delusion or political complacency… a shaking that breaks any illusory thinking that the real-time loss of Palestine is about anyone else but us. Subverting the language of craft, Salem’s persistence performs a refusal. As Fargo Tbakhi writes in Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, the word “craft” carries an ethical charge in moments of destruction. Salem’s practice takes up the anaestheticization of this very charge by presenting a riot of works to hold memories, affirming Palestinian strength however fragmentary, imperfect or contingent. Her craft aspires an anchor in the survival of a history of peoples. With each rupture, the body recalls a gesture. In each hand remains the memory of a learned motion that evolves into a pattern.
At the Last Sky takes its title from Mahmoud Darwish’s namesake poem, marking the duality of living between the Earth, closing in, and a sky that is both threshold and horizon. As an expanse under which destruction takes place, it is also a space where memory and imagination are projected into the future. At the Last Sky attempts to embody a threshold, moving past quotidian affinities towards mass mobilization. From solidarity towards utopian vision, Salem’s position is a diasporic question of navigating privilege and guilt. At times of segregation and divisiveness, in her dynamic, vulnerable, aspirational politics, one can find several ways of being with the world, differential ways of seeing, and living in ones fullest authenticity. Normalizing radical vulnerability and refusal in one fell swoop, At the Last Sky returns agency to the viewer to say, “Under the same sky, your memory and forgetting are my own.”
Accompanying Programs
At The Last Sky will be accompanied by a series of public programs that invite visitors to engage directly with the artist and her practice.
Opening Reception — October 3, 6–9 PM
Celebrate the launch of the exhibition with conversation, drinks, and music. Free and open to all.Weaving Demonstration — October 18 and November 23, 2–4 PM
Kiki Salem will activate her large loom in the gallery, offering visitors a chance to watch her process and try weaving themselves.Cherokee Street Print Bazaar — December 6
Salem and her project PunkAssArab will take part in the neighborhood’s annual print bazaar with limited edition prints, apparel, and more.Artist Talk — December 13, 4–6 PM
Closing the exhibition, Salem will discuss her work, process, and themes in a public conversation.
As a 2024–2025 resident, programming partner, past studio member, and now exhibiting artist, Salem’s long-standing relationship with The Luminary comes full circle. The exhibition is collaboratively organized with staff and volunteers: Kalaija Mallery (Executive and Artistic Director), Kristina Murray (Gallery Manager), Kevin Harris, Steven Tong and Kellen Wright (Installation, Fabrication, Tech), Kentaro Kumanomido (Deputy Director), with special thanks to Pia Singh.
About the Artist
Kiki Salem (b. 1995, Al-Bireh, Palestine) is a St. Louis-based artist who combines ancient visual patterns and traditional craft to create vibrant hybridized works. Born to a Palestinian father and a Palestinian-Brazilian mother, her multicultural, multilingual, transcontinental upbringing has informed an art practice that transcends and accompanies commonality. Through an experimental approach to material and color, she is able to reimagine textile and architectural design from the Arab/Muslim world into sculptural weavings, large scale murals, tapestry, animation, tattoo and print. Her wearable graphic project, PunkAssArab, has allowed her to reach a global audience through the exploration of the Arabic language and themes central to the Arab diasporic experience. Kiki is a member of the Screwed Arts Collective in St. Louis. She has taught Palestinian Tatreez workshops at UCLA, the University of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota. Her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cue Art Foundation in New York, SpaceHub in Birzeit, and has been featured or has appeared in Hyperallergic, Vogue, GQ Middle East, Southern Graphics Council International (SGCI), Middle East Monitor and The Brooklyn Rail.