Archiving the Unseen: Reflections on Ethics, Memory, and Visibility in Ethiopian Art

Author Dagim Abebe

Image by author.

“The archive is not a neutral box of documents but a system of power, a form of knowledge, and a battlefield of memory.”— Michel Foucault

To speak of archiving Ethiopian art is to enter a space where visibility, silence, survival, and resistance intersect. Archives are never passive; they construct narratives as much as they preserve them. In the Ethiopian context, where official repositories are limited and artistic memory often survives through informal, embodied, or oral traditions, the very act of archiving becomes an ethical gesture. As Achille Mbembe argues, “To archive is to select”, and selection is never innocent. In this case, the Ethiopian Art Archive becomes a site of collection; it becomes a proposition: that Ethiopian artistic expression, across generations and media, deserves to be remembered on its terms as a living epistemology.

Ethiopia’s modern and contemporary art history has to be preserved and archived; otherwise, it will be deliberately erased. This silence doesn’t look accidental; without any interest in that, it becomes a result of institutional neglect, selective preservation, and the enforcement of state-approved narratives over the diverse realities of artistic expression. Even foundational figures and pioneers who grappled with faith, exile, and identity in their work are caught in a paradox: their legacies are nominally honored, yet their artworks remain scattered, understudied, or rotting in private hands. A museum may bear a name, but without rigorous scholarship, accessible collections, or preservation efforts, the homage rings hollow.

The pattern of erasure is even more glaring for artists whose work transcended borders. Some, celebrated in major global institutions, are conspicuously absent from Ethiopia’s national collections. Their seminal works, which reshaped modern African aesthetics, are nowhere to be found in their homeland. Instead, their influence survives only through fragments, faded photocopies, oral histories passed between generations, and the fading memories of those who knew them. No public archive holds their papers; no concerted effort has been made to reclaim what was lost to exile or indifference.

The gap extends beyond the modernists. Artists who transformed local visual languages into universal abstractions, or who gained international acclaim for reinventing material traditions, remain marginal in their own country’s archives. Their work is better documented in foreign exhibitions than in Ethiopian art histories. This is not a passive oversight; it is an active displacement, one that prioritizes the demands of the global market over the cultural ecosystems that nurtured these visionaries.

These absences reveal a systemic truth: Ethiopia’s archives do not mirror its artistic brilliance. They reflect the biases of a handful of gatekeepers, those who cater to some agendas or chase validation. The so-called "archival void" is not a lapse; it is policy.

This cannot stand. If Ethiopian art is to survive, the fight for its preservation must be uncompromising. Every possible measure documentation, repatriation, digitization, and grassroots archiving, must be pursued. The cost of inaction is the annihilation of memory itself.

In her seminal text The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor distinguishes between the archive (as supposedly stable and enduring) and the repertoire (as embodied, lived, and ephemeral). Ethiopian art complicates this binary. Much of what is vital in Ethiopian visual culture, religious processions, ritual-based and performance practices, and traditional textile making lives in the repertoire. The archive often fails to capture this moving, shifting bodily knowledge.

What then does it mean to digitize an archive of Ethiopian art? Can the digital archive contain the nuances of oral history, the physical weight of artistic craftsmanship, or the community knowledge embedded in the artworks? These are questions we must ask, not to arrive at clear answers, but to remain ethically alert.

Ethics as Method

Ethiopia’s modern and contemporary art history has not simply been neglected; it has been systematically erased through what can only be called epistemicide, a calculated destruction of knowledge perpetuated by unethical logics, neoliberal extraction, and institutional gatekeeping. This erasure manifests most violently in how artistic practice is archivally framed, where multidimensional creators, those working fluidly across painting, performance, ritual and radical experimentation, are forcibly squeezed into Western taxonomies that amputate their work’s vital contexts. When sacred sculpture becomes “craft,” when syncretic modernism is deemed “derivative,” the archive commits epistemic violence, overwriting artistic intention with bureaucratic preferences. The gatekeeping is deliberate: state-aligned narratives and market-friendly tropes like the “Afrofuturist” or “recycled-material visionary” get preserved, while artists engaging spiritual systems or reviving endangered techniques disappear into storage rooms; Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics applied to culture. De-colonial archiving must therefore be revolutionary, not reformist. It requires artist-led framing that treats creator manifestos as scripture rather than supplement; disciplinary refusal that lets a single practice exist simultaneously as painting, poetry and provocation; and living archives that digitally reconnect works to their untamed ecosystems. The goal is not merely to preserve Ethiopian art, but to dismantle the curation matrix itself, asserting art’s right to its full, irreducible complexity beyond the sterilizing grasp of institutional taxonomies.

Moreover, the diasporic presence of Ethiopian artists across the globe introduces additional complexity. How do we account for works created in exile or migration, in languages and styles influenced by transnational experience? How do we avoid fetishizing origin while still honoring the particularities of place?

An ethical approach requires us to decenter authority. It asks curators, scholars, and institutions to act as facilitators of knowledge, not gatekeepers. It requires crediting informal networks, family collections, oral narrators, and artist-led archives as legitimate sources of knowledge.

The Ethiopian Art Archive is not a finished product; it is a work in progress, a structure under construction. It aspires to document not just artworks, but the conditions of their making, the intellectual and emotional labor behind them, and the communities they emerge from.

To that end, we must archive the process alongside the product. Artist interviews, studio visits, ephemera, sketches, and even refusals to be shown, to be categorized, must be respected as part of the archive’s ecosystem.

We must also resist the temptation of completeness. As Mbembe reminds us, the archive is always partial, always shaped by absence. Our role, then, is not to claim totality, but to foreground gaps, to acknowledge what remains unseen, and to create structures flexible enough to adapt as new voices emerge.

Conclusion:

This reflection is not a manifesto but an invitation. I write as a practitioner who has witnessed firsthand the fragility of artistic memory in Ethiopia, how easily an artist’s work can disappear after their death; how many exhibitions go undocumented; how often visual culture is treated as secondary to text-based history.

Let the Ethiopian Art Archive be a place where such disappearances are interrupted. Let it be shaped not only by curators and scholars, but by artists, communities, and those who live with the art, touching it, naming it, and challenging it. To archive is to care. To care is to complicate. And to complicate it is, perhaps, the most honest form of ethics we can offer.

References

1.     Foucault, Michel. 1969. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books.

2.     Mbembe, Achille. 2002. "The Power of the Archive and its Limits." In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh, 19-26. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers.

3.     Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.

4.     Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.