Curatorial statement: Fresh Voices: Emerging Bodies

Curated by Dagim Abebe

Fresh Voices: Emerging Bodies presents the work of this year’s graduates from Alle School of Fine Arts and design, AAU andTeferi Mekonnen School, department of fine arts, positioning them at a critical threshold where new ideas assume material form. The fresh voice signals an entry into the public sphere asdeclaration of perspective, critique, and vision. The emerging body grounds these voices in presence: the tactile, visual, and spatial manifestations through which they take shape.

At the core of this exhibition lies the interplay between voice and body. Fresh Voices represent the artist’s articulated intentions, their conceptual and emotional stance toward culture, politics, and environment. Emerging Bodies materialize these intentions, giving them physical form, occupying space, texture, and dimension. Without the body, the voice risks invisibility; without the voice, the body risks muteness. This dialectic defines the curatorial framework: voice as intention, body as manifestation. Drawing from phenomenology, postcolonial thought, and embodiment theory, the exhibition treats voice and body as inseparable registers of artistic practice. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that perception and communication are embodied reminds us that artistic expression is never purely intellectual - it is felt, inhabited, and enacted through the body. For these graduates, fresh voices emerge not as abstract proclamations but through paint strokes, installations, digital media, and gestures that become the living corpus of their ideas.

Here, the body functions as a living archive, echoing AchilleMbembe’s theorization of it as a site inscribed with histories, cultural memories, and lived traces. The fresh voice, then, becomes reinterpretation, a reactivation of this archive, negotiating tradition and resistance, memory and innovation. Through their emerging bodies, these artists assert not only the right to be seen but also to narrate their stories, a crucial politics of appearance in Ethiopia’s contemporary context, where visibility and voice remain contested and vital. The exhibition traces the dynamic co-evolution of voice and body: as the artist’s voice sharpens through engagement with materials, scale, and space, so too does the body of work evolve in form and public resonance. This reciprocity generates works that resist thematic uniformity, inhabiting what Homi Bhabha terms the third space, a zone of hybridity where identities, histories, and meanings intersect and transform.

Some pieces confront the body politic directly, articulating dissent or vulnerability; others engage ecological fragility and ethics of care. Across these approaches, there is a shared refusal to sever thought from action or form from meaning, demonstrating how fresh voices, through emerging bodies, negotiate the complexities of Ethiopia’s contemporary condition.Fresh Voices: Emerging Bodies become a proposition for how art can hold complexity. It is an encounter with voices unafraid to speak, bodies unapologetically present, and practices that expand the horizons of Ethiopian contemporary art. What emerges is not closure but an opening: a map of potential futures, charted through both language and embodiment.