My name is Karim Bassegoda, aka Keight, and I was born in Lausanne in 1988. I live and work in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, where my studio is located, near the city of Lausanne. In 2013, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication, majoring in Graphic Design, from the Lausanne University of Art and Design (ECAL).
Throughout my career, my artistic work has been exhibited in different cities around the world, lending it international exposure. In 2012, I was selected to exhibit at the 2nd Graphic Art Biennial of Szeklerland, in Romania; then, following my training at ECAL, I took part in a project for Hors Pistes as part of an artist residency in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where I worked together with industrial designers, graphic designers, photographers, artists, and artisans. The project was a success and was exhibited first in Ouagadougou, and then in Europe via Paris, Brussels, Milan, and Lausanne. As a finalist and exhibitor at various national and international competitions in Rome, London, Paris, Gimpo (near Seoul), Geneva, Martigny, and Lausanne, I became increasingly interested in intercontinental artistic exchanges.
Next to my artistic work, in which I develop my visual language and offer various workshops, I studied at the University of Teacher Education (HEPL) in Vaud, where I received a Master of Arts in Visual Arts Education in 2019. I then continued in the pedagogical field at the Swiss Federal University for Vocational Education and Training (SFUVET), where I completed my training with a federal diploma in teaching Design and Media.
KEIGHT SIGNS & EXPERIMENTS
I am a multidisciplinary artist who offers a variety of experiments and mediums, from
“traditional” art over immersive installations to digital works. My references are strongly
aligned with artists known for a distinctly visual semiotic, such as Edvard Munch, the
Delaunays, or Vasarely, but also with more contemporary creators who blend “graphical” and
“metaphysical” dimensions, principal among whom are Paul Laffoley, Alfred Latour, and
Matt Mullican. Equal parts artist and designer, and both conceptual and expressionist, I
take you on a visual journey through my unique language, peppered with references and
symbolic pictograms that circumscribe my abundant yet coherent universe. The word
“Keight” conjures up the image of a “trapdoor”, and in this way, I have you descend into
basements or ascend into attics, to discover the secrets of the psyche that are buried deep or
perched up high. Beyond the formal quality of my creations, I invite you to join in a meditative
experience, expressed through pieces that are so many states of consciousness,
transporting you back to your deepest feelings. Four series summarise and interconnect my
exploratory vision of the inwardness necessary to freedom of choice: Life, Society, Death,
Metadiscovery. Like the matrices of an ecosystem, they form four gigantic “manifesto” panels
that invite us to embrace life, reject social attitudes, face death, and release our energies into
the global flow...
