The artist in his own words:

There is that gap that is found between two situations or realities, the gap that exists within space, time, culture, history, gender, knowledge, information and the like. I am interested in that moment of the in-between, when things are caught up in a space of transition where forms, contents and sounds take nothing but ambiguous shapes. For the past twelve years, I have been traveling within Ethiopia as well as abroad. Ever since I was a child and all the way through school, things I learned and heard about were mostly made up of information that I did not experience first-hand. Travelling opened a new horizon for me. I started seeing and experiencing things differently. I have always been keen on the notion of knowledge and its’ dissemination. How does information travel? What happens during its’ transition? What is lost and what is gained? What happens to each of the side? What does remain as is and what is transformed in the process? What happens in the in-between moment? 

Nowadays technology has made it possible for people to connect fast and be in touch all the time irrespective of where they physically are. I am particularly intrigued by the fragmentations, cracks and disconnections that occur during communication. My interest lies in the time lapse that is created while information is traveling from one end to the other. 

This lapse not only happens in real time but also within the communication codes such as language, sound and image. Two people may be interacting in their mother-tongue or may be speaking a language that may be foreign for one of the interlocutors or for both. During the interaction, there is that liminal space that is inhabited by uncertainties and ambiguity deriving from the interlocutors’ background made up of culture, history, tradition, gender, identity and language itself. 

I have taken inspiration from the smart phone and the universal symbols used on social media to explore the notion of the liminal. In countries and places where the quality of internet service is poor, the images at times can be blurred and the sounds indistinguishable making communication erratic. We are forced to guess and decipher the message, thus giving it form and meaning ourselves. I have used such images to explore issues inherent to gaps existing in-between things and ideas. The blurred images become a conduit to explore fissures arising in history, space, time, situations and information. The universal symbols and words used in social media (emojis, like, share, play, forward, rewind, etc.) are significant elements in this current body of work. We are so used to these symbols that we hardly notice or think about them. It is fascinating to me how the whole world manages to communicate with a click without any barrier. Or is that what we think? My intention is to engage the viewer to explore, decipher and investigate that space in the in-between, the space that is there but at the same time missing, the space that is inhabited simultaneously by presence and absence…the liminal space.