(SELECTION)
Memory back and forth
2011
Video installation and performance: 2m x1m50cm wooden box, 15meter drawing, two video’s, sound
This project concerns very personal experiences of mine dealing with time, death, memory, physical change and communication. This included the experience of removing the bones of my mother from her grave fifteen years after her death and confronting a long gone past. I was trying to communicate with the deceased as a living being, an active person trying to create a dialogue with a lifeless being and understand. The whole thing is interconnected. I am also interested in how through time your body disappears in to nature. In a way I am also trying to give my mother a future life by putting it on a journey, dig out the remains and carryon and showing no end The attachment I have to my memories, the place and my communication and interaction with the soil and her bones is about the displacement in life: When the grave is being opened it actually opens the entire system around it which people have relationship to their past, peoples relationship to their value of the past. I am digging and opening up to show what is in this hole but it is also an opportunity to show all this other kinds of things that are opening up around it and what is replacing it.
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Memory back and forth, 2
2012
Street performance: umbrella, fabric, video, photography
Addis Ababa city urbanization: a city that half of it is pioneering and the other part of the city is dying.
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Notions of peace
Silence
2012
Installation: Fabric, lights
Peace is big question mankind have tried to answer for centuries. In times like this I want to take peace to a deeper level and individualize it. In a chaotic world we live in, I believe that peace can be experienced personally, and my personal experience of peace is silence. Silence will take us to a subtle level, and silence will challenge our crazy and busy mind. A silence like this could be practiced and unify the peace of the humankind.
I wanted to create a space that can provide a silence and shielding feeling that can take us to a peaceful moment. In my installation the art work and the audience are mixed, as the audience step inside the work and interact with and experience it. The installation will be inadequate without the feeling of a person experiencing it.
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Eri Bekentu
2012
Video, Sound, 10’, Loop
In collaboration with Nina Schuiki
What does a home mean? What will you take with you when you leave your home for good? What will you leave there behind? A perception of people’s relationship and attachment to their values and past.
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Stake Out
2012
installation: wood piles, strings, torches, dimension unknown
In collaboration with Nina Schuiki
The installation, using the technique of stacking out a planned shape of a yet nonexistent building, reflects upon the spatial and social structure of a former Kebele neighborhoods.
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Naked classrooms
2010
Photography
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Street Performers
2010
Photography
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Barbure
2010
Photography
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The copy machine
2010
Photography
Helen Zeru Araya 