Robel Temesgen: Confluence

About

In recent years, Temesgen’s practice has been concerned with developing a visual language for the spiritual and depicting the lived experiences of particular Ethiopian landscapes. In the current exhibition, the artist creates a convergence of seemingly disparate concepts, the spiritual and the political, which, on closer examination avail themselves to the possibility of a nuanced allegiance. The exhibition is an investigation into the appropriation of spiritual gatherings, such as the Ethiopian Irreecha thanksgiving holiday, into occasions for political protest. Temesgen takes his longstanding depiction and influence of the sacred place Hora Harsadi, which often culminated in representations of a spiritual and mental landscape, and imagines the natural progression of the space as an occasion for necessary acts of activism.