Teklemariam Mohammed (b. 2002, Ethiopia) is a mixed-media artist transforming urban decay into meditations on memory and identity. Based in Addis Ababa, his found-material assemblages honed from Palette Art Studio to Addis Ababa Art School (BFA), Addis Ababa University. His 2024 Harmony Palette exhibition (Aurora Art Gallery) revealed beauty in rupture, bridging material transformation with human stories. Through weathered surfaces and cultural fragments, he explores preservation, erasure, and the poetry of urban change.
I work with memory as both material and metaphor - collecting the physical remnants of forgotten histories to examine how objects bear witness to human experience. My practice centers on the archaeology of the discarded: weathered wood holding the imprint of vanished hands, fabric frayed by forgotten use, metal shaped by absent labor. These materials become my collaborators, each carrying what I call their "construction story" - the embedded narrative of their making, use, and abandonment.
Through mixed-media assemblage, I create visual layers where these fragments enter into new dialogue. The process is one of resurrection and revelation - rust becomes pigment, cracks turn into cartographies, and stains transform into shadows of former lives. I'm particularly drawn to materials that embody paradox: their surfaces show vulnerability through patina and fracture, yet demonstrate remarkable endurance. In this tension between fragility and resilience, I find powerful analogues for the human condition - our capacity to bear marks of trauma while persisting, to show wear while retaining essence.
My compositions serve as meditations on displacement, collective memory, and the poetry of imperfection. Layered textures and subdued chromatic fields evoke the passage of time, while deliberate fractures in the picture plane suggest interrupted narratives. The work invites viewers to practice a different mode of attention - to perceive dignity in deterioration and find meaning in marginalia. Ultimately, I position my art as an act of ethical seeing: by reclaiming what has been cast aside, we might better understand the stories we choose to preserve and those we allow to fade.