Wendimagegn Belete

A recurring theme in Wendimagegn Belete’s work is the exploration of cultural heritage and identity, trauma, storytelling, and ownership. For the Eckbos Legat Grant Exhibition, he presents All That Remains of Tomorrow, a 12-metre-long hand-embroidered artwork that, according to the artist, “reclaims history and memory, challenges colonial archives, and foregrounds the labour and cultural significance of local artisans.”

This hand-embroidered textile piece emerges from a material practice of preserving and transmitting knowledge. Developed with more than forty artisans, craft makers, spiritual practitioners, and community members, the monumental textile brings together images drawn from archives, oral traditions, manuscripts, histories of resistance, church paintings, and everyday life. Each stitch carries time, gesture, memory, and conversation. Their involvement shifts authorship from the singular artist toward a collective body of makers, bringing artistic production into relation with everyday life, ritual, spirituality, care, and embodied labour.

Rather than treating embroidery as decorative or domestic craft, the work approaches it as a methodology and a living archive. Cultural knowledge is not simply preserved; it is transmitted and renewed through the act of making. The process becomes a form of knowledge in itself—connecting people, carrying histories, and creating continuity between generations.

This collective process also proposes another form of cultural return, or restitution: not through the movement of objects alone, but through the reactivation of cultural knowledge and living traditions. The work becomes a space where histories are not fixed, but remain active through participation, memory, and shared experience.

The politics of inclusion is embedded in the making. By bringing together different forms of knowledge and experience, the work questions established distinctions between artist and artisan, art and craft, individual authorship and collective production. What emerges is not simply an image, but a record of relationships, labour, and shared responsibility.

Most importantly, the textile is presented from its reverse side, foregrounding hidden labour and functioning as a counter-archive. This reversal is both an aesthetic and political gesture, withholding immediate access to the image from the viewer. Instead of offering a resolved image, the reverse side slows recognition and draws attention to the process behind it. Loose threads, visible knots, irregular surfaces, and unfinished edges reveal the labour and time embedded in the work. What might be understood as imperfection or incompleteness becomes evidence of continuity: of hands working, histories being carried, and knowledge remaining in motion.

The work does not seek to resolve the past. It creates a space in which the past can continue to live through collective making and proposes an alternative way of rethinking the present.

Wendimagegn Belete (b. 1986, Ethiopia) holds an MFA from the Academy of Contemporary Art in Tromsø and a BFA from AAU Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Ethiopia. Working across installation, textiles, video, and painting, he often incorporates found materials and collaborative processes into his practice. His work explores the intersections of memory, history, identity, and spirituality through the lens of epigenetic inheritance, examining how memories and experiences can be transmitted across generations beyond conventional forms of inheritance.

His recent solo exhibitions include Kunstnerforbundet (2025), The FABRIKKEN Foundation for Art and Design, Copenhagen (2025), Tenthaus Oslo (2023), Nordnorsk kunstnersenter (2023), Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art (2022), and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin (2022, 2021). Belete has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Norway and internationally. In 2022, he was awarded the Norwegian Government Grant for Artists, a ten-year working grant for established artists.