WENDIMAGEGN BELETE

Practice

Belete received a BFA from the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University in 2012 and an MFA in Contemporary Art from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative Writing in 2017. His movement from Ethiopia to Norway marked an important shift in his practice, sharpening his attention to distance, inheritance, and the unstable ways that personal and collective histories are remembered, translated, and retold.

Working across multiple media, Belete builds richly textured surfaces from photographs, letters, maps, textiles, recorded conversations, and found objects. These materials are combined with painting, collage, stitching, and gestural mark-making to create works that move between abstraction and figuration, and between intimate memory and wider historical narratives. His work frequently engages the idea of epigenetic inheritance, treating memory as something transmitted across generations through images, objects, rituals, and embodied knowledge rather than through official histories alone.

Themes and Exhibitions

A recurring concern in Belete’s work is the question of who gets to shape historical narrative. By reworking archival imagery and salvaged materials, he often challenges colonial frameworks of representation and opens space for alternative readings of Ethiopian and African identity. In works such as Your Gaze Makes Me (2021), he assembles portraits and objects into expansive compositions that recover anonymous or overlooked lives, while more recent bodies of work have expanded into textiles and sculpture that emphasise spirituality, ritual, and bodily presence.

This development is especially visible in Of Water and the Spirit (2024), where mixed-media paintings, suspended textiles, and sculptural forms transform the gallery into a contemplative environment shaped by found objects, beadwork, and layered references to place and ancestral knowledge. Across solo exhibitions including Code Switch, Your Gaze Makes Me, Moment “Andafta”, Frozen Memories, and Rite of Passage, Belete has developed a visual language that brings together archival research and improvisational making. His work has also appeared in major international contexts such as the Future Generation Art Prize at PinchukArtCentre, the Bangkok Art Biennale, and the Gwangju Biennale, signalling a growing international profile.

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Ocula | 2026