Editorials
Yared Olivelli: “Way in // Way out”
In a windowless Addis Ababa basement, Yared Olivelli’s layered paintings ask what an archive can prove and what a doorway lets in.
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The compound was surprisingly busy. The children were leaving the school, cars were moving around and the noise was constant. I passed through the security gate and descended the staircase. With each step, the city noise receded. By the time I pushed through the glass door into the gallery, the atmosphere had changed.
Way in // Way out, curated by Dr Semen Kumurzhi, opened at the Italian Cultural Institute in Addis Ababa on 23 June 2026. Its run was extended, and closed on 30 October 2026.
The gallery is in the basement, with no windows or natural light. The artificial lights were dim, and I found myself wishing for more light. A large table around the central column displayed posters and catalogues. Most of the artwork was square. I was the only visitor. That made the experience feel quite personal, but also a little lonely.
Architecturally, the gallery pushed me to experience the psychological and spiritual concerns of Way in // Way out with a movement established through the space. The gallery changes how the works are encountered, while the works in turn make the gallery feel like a space in which something is being remembered and concealed.
From the left, the exhibition begins with Gratitude // ምስጋና (3), with the force of an encounter. The work brought me back to a childhood memory of entering a church and seeing women gathered in prayer. Looking at some of the figures, I found myself thinking of my mother and the women I remember seeing in the church when I was very young. The figures dressed in white netela, the traditional cotton shawl, appear within a fog that recalls the frankincense smoke of an Ethiopian Orthodox church. The fog gathered above the figures produced the impression that something was suspended between the visible and invisible.
![Yared Olivelli, mixed media on canvas. [Title and dimensions to be matched against the checklist.] Photo: Dagim Abebe. Courtesy of the artist.](https://framerusercontent.com/images/Fx3OMcx8KrhNwOKqfoUEhux2G8Q.jpg?width=1938&height=1673)
I couldn’t smell the frankincense, but the fog forced me to imagine the interior of the church. The works do not reproduce the church as a documentary image, but they activate a memory of being there. The fog carries an emotional and sensory knowledge of the church, held in the body rather than in documentation. The women feel that something is there beyond their bodies: a memory of ritual and an encounter with what cannot be seen.
Close by, Unfinished Memory // ያልተቋጨ ትዝታ (3) and (4) introduce a field of uncertainty. The archival imagery in Unfinished Memory (3) appears unsettled and unstable. The figures float rather than rest securely within the composition. An archive provides evidence for preserving and retrieving the past. What happens when the archival image will not settle into that evidence? What emerges when the image appears fragmented or incomplete?
![Yared Olivelli, Above // ከላይ (1), mixed media on canvas, 140 x 120 cm. Photo: Dagim Abebe. Courtesy of the artist. [Caption to be matched to the image.]](https://framerusercontent.com/images/tIfOgtOBS4T0z47kNQjDBSGYIE.jpg?width=1955&height=1950)
Olivelli works with acrylic, oil and image transfer, adding another layer of painting marks in the transfer imagery. The images remain recognisable, while the paint alters the way we see them. The layering creates the tension between the trace and his artistic intervention. His compositions are a little bit too complicated. In the works, the images and forms do not always appear grounded. Their suspension raises questions about the memory that we try to contain. What is our history? What happens when its foundations become uncertain?
![Yared Olivelli, The Ascent // ዕርገት, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Photo: Dagim Abebe. Courtesy of the artist. [Caption to be matched to the image.]](https://framerusercontent.com/images/TrE6cgOkKX6vuj0anTIoW8OdBWo.jpg?width=1935&height=1933)
Way in // Way out holds all these questions open. The title suggests movement in two directions: an entrance may also be an exit.
One of the works that stayed with me, Above // ከላይ (1), contains a bookshelf resembling those found in a modern library. Yet the shelves offer no readable titles to guide the viewer. This raises the possibility that the structure through which knowledge is stored does not necessarily make the past understandable. The other works, with women in prayer, offer a different relation to uncertainty. In The Ascent // ዕርገት, the figures on the floor suggest, through their posture, a congregation waiting for something to arrive. Here, attention turns towards what remains beyond immediate perception.
![Yared Olivelli, Gratitude // ምስጋና (5), mixed media on canvas, 120 x 120 cm. Photo: Dagim Abebe. Courtesy of the artist. [Caption to be matched to the image.]](https://framerusercontent.com/images/m9X6i3d9bZKXqtVezYxd6bVcM.jpg?width=1852&height=1877)
Olivelli’s artist’s statement suggests different things. The exhibition is described as a battle of the spirit and the body as a house with doors — “a place with doors that require a guardian” — and says the concept was developed over several days in a monastery. It is a spiritual, inward reading. Mine, in the gallery, was historical and archival. The transferred images raised questions about memory and evidence, and they appeared to me like images retrieved from an unsettling past. The church work complicates this: there my body responded, along with my memory, to the women in white netela and the smoke. Maybe this disagreement is the show’s true subject. The archive asks what can be proved; the doors ask what we let in and what we cast out. Olivelli’s artworks, unlike his statement, do not choose between them.
When I left the gallery, I found myself thinking about a question I had written in my notebook: when does the artist finish their work, and when does the work begin to take shape in the minds of the audience? I kept thinking about it after I returned to the city, over coffee.
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