Artist Talk with Artist in Residence Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew

Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew is an Ethiopian visual artist and a lecturer at the Addis Ababa University, Alle School of Fine Arts and Design. He graduated with BFA from the same school and further studied and graduated with MA in Fine Arts from Utrecht Graduate School of the Arts in the Netherlands. Berhanu has critically been engaged with various individual and collective artistic projects inside and outside studio environment. Multidisciplinary creative outcomes of his projects have been shown in different countries; some of which are Ethiopia, Germany, Netherlands, France, Georgia, Italy, Greece and Spain. In the last few years, Berhanu has actively been working on issues that come along with change / development / transformation / modernization activities of urban spaces and places and the human conditions in it. He has been engaged through process based creative production activities that generates open-ended possibilities to interact, engage, discuss, react and imagine; beyond the everyday. He also strongly believes in participation and collaboration through creative production processes, in which he has managed to use different creative approaches without boundaries on the materiality, performativity and interactivity of his artworks.
Berhanu has also been actively coorganizing, participating and contributing in different conferences, workshops, seminars, festivals, educational and professional projects through various international platforms; some of which are Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Bamako Biennale Telling Time Bamako (Mali), Festival of Future Nows Berlin (Germany), Video_Brasil Southern Panoramas Sao Paulo (Brazil), European Forum Alpbach seminar Inequality Alpbach (Austria), International Conference Future Memories Addis Ababa, Institute of Spatial Experiments Acting Archives Berlin, International Conference Sounds of Change Addis Ababa, Collective Public Art Project Moving Societies Addis Ababa, Tbilisi Triennial Offside Effect Tbilisi (Georgia), Studio Olafur Eliasson You’re here is Our Here Berlin.

Berhanu can be contacted via his emailaddress b.deribew@akbild.ac.at .