A native of Ethiopia, Betelhem Makonnen is an artist living in Austin, TX, with a MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in History and Literature of Africa/African Diaspora from UT Austin. Her work in photography, video, installation, public art and text is shown nationally and internationally– including Women & Their Work, The Contemporary Austin, The Philbrook Museum of Art, Big Medium, Le Musée des Abattoirs, and The Carver Museum, with performances and screenings at The Blanton Museum, IVAHM, and Casa Daros. Her work has been featured in a variety of publications including Artforum, NYT, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Zoetrope, O Menelick 2º Ato, Revista Lampejo, and Glasstire. In addition to her practice she co-organizes Addis Video Art Festival, a platform for video art in Ethiopia, and is a co-founder member of the Austin-based arts collective Black Mountain Project.
A continual blending of anthropological, philosophic, and historical – personal and collective – poetic inquiries forms the conceptual foundation of my practice. My works translate perception, presence, and place by connecting embedded memory and present-day experience through a diasporic consciousness that maps relationships beyond spacial and temporal boundaries.
With unfixed and many-ed points of departure, I use (re)search, (re)configurations, and (re)combinations to make works that take form in the in-between spaces of paradoxes, feedback loops and sites of connection.
I want my works to contribute to an unlearning that brings othered planes of perception into view—questioning what we think we already know, disrupting the rote programming we repeat without difference, re-imagining fixed ways of seeing towards a moveable lens.
With unfixed and many-ed points of departure, I use (re)search, (re)configurations, and (re)combinations to make works that take form in the in-between spaces of paradoxes, feedback loops and sites of connection.
I want my works to contribute to an unlearning that brings othered planes of perception into view—questioning what we think we already know, disrupting the rote programming we repeat without difference, re-imagining fixed ways of seeing towards a moveable lens.
Photo by Moyo Oyelola