ARA Podcast - Artistic Research in Africa - a conversation with Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

Arts Research Africa Dialogues

In this ARA dialogue I speak with the Ethiopian artist-researcher who gave the closing address at our ARA2020 Conference.
Berhanu is currently a lecturer in the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University and is a doctoral candidate in the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Alle School where he was the gold medal winner in his final year, and subsequently studied for his Master of Fine Arts at the Utrecht Graduate School of the Arts in the Netherlands.
Berhanu has been engaged with numerous individual and collective artistic projects both inside and outside the studio environment and has exhibited the results of his projects in Ethiopia, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Georgia, Italy, Greece and Spain. In the last few years, Berhanu has been working with a particular emphasis on the human issues that have come from the modernisation of urban spaces, notably in his home city of Addis Ababa.
In this discussion, Berhanu talks about the ground-breaking Interdisciplinary Arts Practice MA programme which he helped introduce at the Alle School in 2014. The two year programme allows students from a range of backgrounds - fine arts, music, performing arts, as well as architecture, psychology, and philosophy - to work collaboratively using different research modalities.
We also explore Berhanu's own artistic-research projects, notably his contribution to the collective project Despite Dispossession, and his own intervention into the history of dispossession in Addis Ababa: "Care and Become".
Finally we explore Berhanu's ideas concerning mourning in the context of the suffering and anger in the global south, and the role of artistic research in such conditions.
Useful Links:
Despite Dispossession: An Activity Book.
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/46498
Closing Address: Artistic Research in Africa-rethinking the" avant-garde"
http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/29233