Tariku Shiferaw Brings the Night Sky Home

Africa Art News’s Brian Wandera speaks with New York-based Ethiopian painter Tariku Shiferaw about his first exhibition on the continent. This exhibition is an imagined night sky built from diasporic mythology and highlights what it means to return to a city that has been under construction in his imagination for decades.

​

Born in Addis Ababa and now based in New York, Tariku Shiferaw has developed one of the most distinctive abstract painting practices of the past decade. His Mata Semay series imagines an alternative night sky that reclaims cosmological value systems for the African diaspora.

​

Adey Abeba, curated by Jermay Michael Gabriel, is presented at the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University, an institution dedicated to the legacy of Ethiopian modernist painter Gebre Kristos Desta, whose work helped establish abstraction as a serious artistic language within Ethiopia.

​

LINK: FULL ARTICLE.