And what and how is ‘the modern’ in Ethiopia?

Modernism initially came to Africa through colonial contact but Ethiopia had never been colonized except for a brief period of Italian occupation from 1936-1941. So when and what was modernism in Ethiopia? Moreover, the experiences of decolonization in Africa also inspired the best of African creativity, addressing the viewpoints of colonizer/colonized on two categories. On the one hand, it reacted to Western modernism in a nativist approach that desired to explore the potentials of Africa’s rich heritage. On the other side, it insisted on a nuanced and localized version of African modernism that envisioned a relationship with European modernism. African modernism subsequently emerged from the experiences of decolonization. Since Ethiopia was never colonized and since the encounter with decolonization had been distant from the Ethiopian experience, what then was the body of knowledge that incited the ranges of Ethiopian modernism? Certainly, Ethiopia’s modern history was also unlike other African countries where the larger implication of colonizer/colonized relations created a fundamental rupture in the history of the colonized and where colonial imagination defined the colonized as incorrigibly ‘Other.’ The inner working of this type of ‘Otherness’ was not the ideology of Ethiopian formal social and political thought. The historical questioning of modernism in Ethiopia subsequently requires the investigation of a series of genealogies and that this lecture attempts to approach.

Elizabeth W Giorgis studied History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University and Museum Studies at New York University. She served as Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and Dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art at Addis Ababa University. She is currently professor of theory and criticism at the College of Performing and Visual Art and the Director of the Modern Art Museum: Gebre Kristos Deta Center at Addis Ababa University. She is the editor and author of several publications among which are; Perspectives on Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism, a special issue guest edited by her in North East African Studies, published by Michigan Sate University; “Charting Ethiopian Modernity and Modernism”, a special issue on Ethiopian art and literature in “Callaloo, Journal of the African Diaspora,” co-edited by her and published by Johns Hopkins University Press; and the only catalogue of contemporary art published in Ethiopia; “Gebre Kristos Desta: The Painter Poet.” She has curated several exhibitions, more recently, an exhibition of Olafur Eliasson’s works titled “Time Sensitive Activity.” She is currently finalizing a book project on Ethiopian modern art history.

Photo Credits: Battle of Adwa painting by Belachew Yimer