Dagim Abebe

Cartographies of the Collective maps the intricate terrain of memory, history, and belonging. This exhibition, which features Dagim Abebe's painting and drawing, approaches cartography not as a technical act of measuring land, but as a poetic and critical practice. It traces how collective experience is inscribed onto space, bodies, and consciousness, revealing the layers of experience that shape our identity.

His artistic practice is driven by an inquiry into how we fit into space—how our movements, rituals, and interactions leave patterns that accumulate into reputations and collective identities. Each work becomes a terrain where fragments of personal memory intersect with these broader communal narratives, producing maps of what is celebrated, silenced, and resilient.

Through a language that hovers between figurative gestures and abstract interventions, the works chart the interplay between visibility and erasure. They present layered surfaces—echoes of public squares, city streets, and intimate recollections—that investigate how societies inscribe themselves, revealing both continuity and loss. The result is not a single, definitive map, but a constellation of overlapping cartographies: at once fragile and resistant, fragmented yet interconnected.

As both the artist and curator, his intention is to create an immersive space where these mappings can be navigated associatively. The exhibition does not seek to offer a fixed history but to open a field for reflection. By foregrounding the tensions between the personal and the collective, the remembered and the suppressed, Cartographies of the Collective invites viewers to navigate these layered geographies. It asks us to consider how our shared identity is drawn not only by what we commemorate, but perhaps more profoundly, by what we neglect to acknowledge, ultimately evoking a sense of responsibility and the possibility of re-imagining our shared futures.