KAYA (Kerstin Brätsch & Debo Eilers) is a collaborative working method between German painter Kerstin Brätsch and American sculptor Debo Eilers, which began in 2010. The name refers to Kaya Serene, the daughter of one of Debo’s childhood friends. KAYA is acting as a fictional and concrete body, conjoin formal, painterly and metabolic procedures in their productions of identity.

They collaborate to cross the boundaries between painting and sculpture, fusing the two artistic genres into a new hybrid artistic approach. These works are vessels of intersubjectivity that both preserve and sublimate the individual hands of the artists, while also offering a geological logic, an organic history of their own making, as they preserve and pulverize or rework previous KAYA performance objects and ephemera into forthcoming works, and repurpose KAYA’s past into a multifaceted, constantly and reusing KAYA’s past to transform it into a diverse, ever-generating body.

Recently, KAYA has moved beyond the image of Kaya Serene to become a collaborative platform that goes beyond the artistic output of Brätsch and Eilers to incorporate the creative energy of the community that builds around itself with each iteration of the project. Typically, this includes fellow artists, students, curators, scholars, and the organizations that host KAYA projects.