The prestigious American gallery showcases the international evolution of the project conceived in Puglia
Following the success of its first presentation at the Matteo Sansone National Archaeological Museum in Mattinata, Puglia, Italian artist Keziat’s project Stelèa arrives in the United States with a new exhibition at 502 Gallery in Sarasota, Florida. The exhibition represents the next stage in a journey that began in 2025 and confirms the growing international recognition of the Puglian artist’s practice. For years, Keziat has established herself on the contemporary art scene through a multidisciplinary language that combines drawing, video art, installation, and performance.
Stelèa originated as a reflection on the relationship between memory and contemporaneity, introducing a new symbolic figure that moves across time, transforming traces of the past into a visual narrative open to the present. Through ballpoint pen drawings on canvas, paper, and unconventional surfaces, video installations, and immersive environments, Keziat creates an ever-evolving universe in which symbols, forms, and presences become instruments of dialogue between different eras and cultures. Stelèa thus becomes a medium between origin and the present, between myth and identity, giving shape to a figure that belongs not to a single moment in history but to a continuous process of metamorphosis.
As Corriere della Sera observed, “Keziat’s work visualizes worlds that connect different realities and transports us into the hidden depths of the human soul.”
In the works on display, time dissolves: past and present coexist within the same visual space, while places, identities, elements of the animal kingdom, nature, and everyday objects merge into a unified landscape. Every image is transformed through the artist’s meticulous and hypnotic ballpoint pen technique—her unmistakable signature—creating visionary environments that hover between reality and imagination.
As Marilena Morabito, curator of last year’s exhibition organized in collaboration with the Regional Directorate of the National Museums of Puglia, the Italian Ministry of Culture, and Musei Italiani, remarked, Stelèa is “an inner and ritual journey through ancestral memory and contemporary reality, between primordial nature and digital landscapes.” It is a path in which cultural heritage becomes living matter, capable of generating new visions and fresh possibilities for interpretation.
The Sarasota exhibition is far more than a reprise of the Italian presentation; it marks a new chapter in the evolution of the project. For 502 Gallery, Keziat has created new works and developed a site-specific exhibition design conceived especially for the American venue, expanding her investigation into the dialogue between collective memory and contemporary visual languages. The exhibition invites visitors to engage with universal themes such as identity, humanity’s relationship with nature, the meaning of ritual, and the constant transformation of human existence.
Born in San Severo and now based in Rome, Kezia Terracciano, known professionally as Keziat, has exhibited in museums, galleries, and international festivals in Venice, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney, Miami, and Johannesburg. Her multidisciplinary practice encompasses drawing, video animation, installation, performance, and theatrical set design. In 2018, she presented the performance Music for Your Eyes at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, the interdisciplinary arts center founded by renowned South African artist William Kentridge, further consolidating a career defined by an ongoing dialogue between visual art and performance.
With Stelèa, Keziat continues her international journey by offering a profound reflection on memory as a space of transformation. Through a poetic yet distinctly contemporary visual language, the artist demonstrates how the symbols of the past can continue to speak to the present, becoming tools for knowledge, imagination, and intercultural dialogue.
The exhibition at 502 Gallery reaffirms the role of contemporary art as a bridge between places that may appear geographically distant but are deeply connected through culture. From Puglia to Florida, from the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean to an international audience, Stelèa invites viewers to rediscover the past not as a place of contemplation, but as an inexhaustible source of new visions.
BIOGRAPHY
Kezia Terracciano, professionally known as Keziat, was born in San Severo, Italy, and is based in Rome. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Foggia in 1998 and has since developed an artistic career that has led her to exhibit in cities around the world, including Venice, Rome, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Miami, and Johannesburg.
As Corriere della Sera wrote, “Keziat’s work visualizes worlds that connect different realities and transports us into the hidden depths of the human soul.”
Between 1996 and 2008, her practice focused primarily on painting while she also worked as an illustrator and comic artist for major international publishers, including Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago), Synergebooks (New York), and 123Publishing House (Hong Kong). Since 2006, she has collaborated with musician and composer Luca Ciarla, developing the multidisciplinary Violipiano Visual projects, in which music, dance, theatre, and visual arts merge into a single expressive language.
In 2009, she launched Visionaria, a project that originated from a series of large-scale ballpoint pen drawings and gradually evolved into animations, video works, and immersive installations. In 2010, her animated short film Memory of a Madman (Memoria di un folle) won the fifth edition of MAGMART – International Video Art Festival, organized in collaboration with the PAN – Palazzo delle Arti Napoli, and later entered the permanent collection of the CAM – Casoria Contemporary Art Museum.
In 2012, Visionaria expanded into an international exhibition project through five solo exhibitions presented at the MAT – Museo dell’Alto Tavoliere in San Severo, the Elsa Morante Cultural Center in Rome, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University, the Sabiana Paoli Art Gallery in Singapore, and the Italian Cultural Institute of Amsterdam.
In 2014, Keziat created the animated logo for the Hollywood film production company Umano. The following year, her work Sounds was acquired by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia after its successful presentation at Art Expo Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur.
In 2016, she introduced Hybrids, her second major international exhibition project. First presented at the MAT – Museo dell’Alto Tavoliere in San Severo, the exhibition subsequently traveled to the Società Dante Alighieri in Miami, the Scuderie Aldobrandini in Frascati, and the Chulalongkorn University Museum in Bangkok as part of the Italian Festival in Thailand.
In 2018, she made her Johannesburg debut at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, the interdisciplinary arts center founded by William Kentridge, presenting Music For Your Eyes, the first chapter of her Introspective project. This was followed by a solo exhibition at Via Umbria Gallery in Washington, D.C., curated by Mary J. Sollway, and another solo exhibition at the Kimonos Art Center in Paphos, Cyprus.
In 2019, she presented the exhibition-performance In_Visible at MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, further consolidating a practice increasingly focused on the dialogue between moving image, space, and performance. In the following years, she expanded her work in theatre, designing video scenography for major Italian productions, including L’Asino by Jesper Halle, produced by Teatro del Loto and Metateatro Pescara; Children of Abraham (Figli di Abramo) by Svein Tindberg; and The Game, written and directed by Gianluca Iumiento for the Teatro Nuovo di Pisa.
In 2025, Keziat inaugurated Stelèa, her most recent artistic project, at the Matteo Sansone Civic Archaeological Museum in Mattinata, as part of an initiative promoted by the Regional Directorate of the National Museums of Puglia, in collaboration with the Italian Ministry of Culture and Musei Italiani. The project continues its international journey with exhibitions scheduled in the United States in 2026 and Asia in 2027.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Dwelling on the memories of the past—silent guardians of history, identity, and knowledge—I have embarked on a dialogue with the present and with what is yet to come. Within these traces, I recognized the essence of a deeply visionary humanity, one capable of living in harmony with nature and of perceiving itself as part of a single living organism. It is this vision that I seek to convey through my work, where animal and vegetal forms inhabit and move through human spaces, dissolving the boundaries between culture and nature, myth and reality. Memory thus becomes a generative force, an impulse that invites us to delve within ourselves, transforming the past into an ongoing search for meaning—one that illuminates the present and opens new possibilities for the future.
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