The Spaces Africa | Woven Memories, A solo Exhibition

Birhanu Manaye's Woven Memories unfolds as a material conversation between absence and presence, where domestic relics become living archives. This exhibition-repurposed curtain, its floral pattern bleeding through layers of silkscreened print, hangs like a suspended memory. Discarded linens stitched with photographic fragments form a palimpsest of private and collective histories. Here, every textile is a contested territory, its stains, and repairs mapping the quiet revolutions of cultural survival.

Birhanu's artistic methodology mirrors the very processes he examines: the deliberate unraveling of fabrics becomes an analog for cultural deconstruction, while the reassembly through print and stitch proposes radical renewal.

Central to the exhibition is “The River of Memory”, an installation of silkscreen print with objects used for daily life household activity, each thread connecting personal loss to collective memory erasure. Nearby, Threshold reworks are not aesthetic juxtapositions but deliberate collisions, where material tension becomes a historical dialogue.

What emerges is neither nostalgia nor rupture, but what theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay terms "potential history" is the active renegotiation of meaning through material intervention. When Birhanu dips he isn't blending cultures but exposing their power dynamics.

This exhibition asks viewers to reconsider their role as cultural custodians: How do we honor what we must alter? When does preservation become betrayal? This makes the theory urgently personal.

Woven Memories ultimately argues that heritage isn't inherited; it's stitched together daily from what we dare to repurpose.
- Dagim Abebe, Curator

This show runs from 10th May - 25th June 2025.