When painter Ermias Ekube visited his family in Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, in 1997, he was unaware of the fact he wouldn’t be able to return to his home in Ethiopia for almost two decades. Ermias had been living in Addis Ababa, when a border conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea left many unable to move or communicate across the two countries. “I was stuck,” the 54-year-old says on a video call. “I had left all my belongings in Addis, including my paintings, and I didn’t know my friends’s whereabouts.” After a multiyear “limbo” period, Ermias eventually accepted he would be staying in Asmara indefinitely until, much like 5000 others in the country were doing each month at the time (according to a United Nations estimate), he fled Eritrea in 2012. “There was a dictatorship, censorship, no freedom of expression, no freedom of movement, so I escaped illegally as Eritreans weren’t allowed to leave the country without an exit visa,” he says, adding that he lived in Nairobi for a year before eventually settling in Sweden in 2013. These experiences have changed not only Ermias’s life but his art, too.
But, moving to Sweden seems to have had the most significant influence on Ermias’s art. From 2021 to 2022, Ermias produced a series of twenty abstract landscapes titled Foreign Lands, which, in 2023, Conde Nast Traveller said, presented “a void to be filled by the gallery-goer’s imagination.” “Landscapes were a new direction in my practice because I was fascinated by the change of seasons and how the landscape transformed from one season to another,” he says. In contrast to Europe, which follows the sequence of winter, spring, summer, and autumn, many African countries have two distinct seasons: the dry season and the wet season (or rain season, as some call it). “I also used charcoal drawings for a period of time to explore the European migration crisis, including me and my fellow immigrants’ experiences.”
Ermias’s most recent body of work, Memories are we are memories, is a series of over three dozen paintings centred around the idea of ‘memory.’ “I’ve been focussing on the subject of memory as it relates to my life moving to and from different places,” he says, pointing out that for him, a ‘memory’ is something that is always changing. “Whenever I talk about the past with people, I’ve noticed that consciously or unconsciously, the story changes,” he says. “You emphasise something or hide something, or something new dominates the story – sometimes what was hidden comes to the foreground.”
Beyond Ermias’s own personal experiences, he also sees these changes in how people talk about Eritrea. “Whenever I see the [Eritrean] government or protestors talk about aspects of its history, it's different each time,” he says. “And then how those memories are evaluated also changes: they reject some parts of history, and emphasise others.” For Ermias, these observations have been the jumping-off point for Memories are we are memories, though in a more “universal sense.” Partially hidden figures are consistently present throughout the series, encouraging viewers to think about memory both personally and on a broader scale. “I want whoever sees the work to either see themselves or no particular person at all,” he says. In turn, he hopes viewers will be moved to consider memory (both their own and others) as “reflections and not real happenings.”
Speaking of reflections: Ermias uses different types of symbolism to explore his idea of ‘memory’ being unreliable and everchanging. In Memories are we are memories #21, the unidentified figure holds a mirror up to the viewer. The reflection reveals a budding plant atop an empty wooden chair. In the foreground, two glasses (one filled with an egg and the other with red wine) are placed on a large green book. For Ermias, the chair “reflects someone who is not there,” putting emotional weight on what has been left behind. “Objects tell you about the absence of that person, especially in the context of the other objects that are present,” he says. “An egg is a symbol of life, but at the same time, it's fragile.” In Memories are we are memories #25, another unidentified figure rests a mirror on his crotch while balancing a chopping board with an onion, paintbrush and egg on his lap. What is resting on his lap does not correspond with the mirror’s reflection – the mirror reveals a knife and a partially cut-up onion. For Ermias, the unreliable reflection embodies how two people might look at the same thing and see something different. “It’s obviously a mirror image, but logically or physically, it doesn't make sense,” he says.
That said, besides unreliability, one of the most consistently recurring themes in Ermias’s latest series is time. In Memories are we are memories #21, a small portion of a clock is in the top left-hand corner. In Memories are we are memories #12, a larger half is on the right-hand side. In Memories are we are memories #30, we see a sand timer, its shadow reflected onto a nearby wall. When considering the idea of memory, exploring the concept’s relationship to time feels like an obvious avenue. But, Ermias points out that his clocks are handless, and sand timers do not provide a definitive understanding of time – both intentional choices. In Memories are we are memories #4, the missing hands are neatly placed on the wooden chair, for example. For Ermias, the references to time (or lack thereof) are not just about the past but how time itself can be restrictive. “For me, time is an entity that is watching us instead of participating [with us],” he says. “[We may have invented the concept of time], but we now can’t live without it. It’s always there, though I prefer the absence of it.”
For Ermias, time has brought him to a new country – but like others who have been displaced, the slippery slope of memory ties him to the places he once lived. In 2015, Ermias returned to Addis in search of his old artworks but only came across a handful. “Though most of them are damaged, friends helped me find the few that had survived,” he says. “And, the one person who had kept those few works had left the country and moved somewhere else.” The paintings were among the objects they had left behind, serving as a memento of all the different memories that brought it to where it was that day.
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Precious Adesina is a London-based journalist with a particular focus on the intersection between arts and culture and social politics. She is regularly published in The New York Times, BBC, Financial Times, The Economist, and cultural magazines including Kinfolk, i-D, RA Magazine, and many others.
Ermias Ekube studied at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts and Design, graduating in 1990. He lives and works in Kalmar, Sweden. Merging figurative and conceptual strands, Ekube’s work draws on thoughts and memories to imbue stories with meaning via simple objects, signs and gestures. Recent exhibitions include Foreign Lands, Ed Cross, London, 2023; The process of changing a meaning that matters or not, Oskarshamn Kulturhuset, 2019; African Artists for Development, Vienna, 2017, and Do Lives Matter?, Malhuset, Oslo, Norway, 2016-17.
