Wendimagegn Belete: Of Water and the Spirit

For his latest exhibition, Ethiopian artist Wendimagegn Belete transforms the white, monumental architecture of Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery’s West Palm Beach space into a vibrant, sacred space that calls on the spiritual presence of found objects as well as the transcendental potential of art to offer new ways of making sense of our heritage and experiences. Incorporating textile works, sculptures and mixed-media paintings, Of Water and the Spirit marks a pivotal point in the artist’s practice, fusing elements of his previous series to create a powerful meditation on place, time and identity.

Belete’s practice is preoccupied with cultural heritage and identity in relation to historical narratives and the concept of epigenetic inheritance, of memories that transfer over generations and permeate our present. Over time, he has collected a vast array of source materials – photographs, indigenous objects, letters, recorded conversations, maps and textiles – which he weaves together to create richly layered visual narratives that move back and forth in time. This latest body of work, titled after a book of the same name by the writer Malidoma Somé, expands on this evolving visual vocabulary with the addition of beads hand-threaded through banana fibres. The delicate, vividly coloured threads appear in mass, forming thick fringes that hang from the top and bottom of his canvases, cascade from his suspended textile works and add to the uncanny presence of his sculptures. They are a reference to place and the long history of beadwork in Ethiopia, but also to ancestral wisdom and rituals which forged a deep connection to and respect for nature.

While we might feel the presence of ancient communities and forms of knowledge most strongly in the sculptures, which most directly resemble figures, standing at 1.8 metres tall, the textile works and paintings also bear a complex bodily presence. Combining found and recycled materials, both old and new, the textile works hang from the ceiling recalling different types of ceremonial and devotional art objects from across the world, while also making us acutely aware of our own body in space. The paintings likewise contain a broad range of archival materials with the artist’s spontaneous marks and collage techniques producing a visual sense of fluidity and intertextuality. Colours, imagery and brushstrokes transcend the boundaries of a single canvas to evoke the impression of shifting landscape or an evolving dialogue. The artist’s hand is always visible, particularly in the paintings where we can trace his brushstrokes across the canvas, but these interventions are abstract and often half-formed, inviting viewers to add their own experiences and narratives to the work. In other words, Belete’s mark-making process is one of dialogue and transformation rather than an act of ownership or assertion of individuality.

This approach is in direct opposition to colonial Western narratives which promoted difference in order to create cultural divisions and which continue to permeate dominating conversations around African culture and art. Belete explored similar ideas in a monumental mural that he created for the Future Generation Art Prize. The mural brought together portraits of individuals and found objects from a diverse range of ethnic groups from across Ethiopia and Western Africa in order to convey a powerful message of strength and unity that challenged Western understandings of ethnicity. In this exhibition, however, he goes one step further by creating an environment that invites not only a deeper connection to materiality and space, but also spiritual meditation. This is a kind of spirituality that exists outside of organised religions: it is a way of connecting to ancient knowledge systems and to nature, of opening ourselves up to more expansive ways of seeing and understanding the world.