Artissima 2025

ArtNoble Gallery is pleased to participate in Artissima 2025 with a monographic booth by Jermay Michael Gabriel (Addis Abeba, 1997) in the New Entries Section of the fair.

Jermay Michael Gabriel is an Italian-Ethiopian-Eritrean trans-disciplinary artist whos work is based on an experimental, and often extreme, effort to resist the permanence and elusiveness of the Italian colonial archive through the subversion of its symbols of power. He starts from the assumption that spaces at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalisation, visibility or representation do not produce liberation. Colonial trauma does not have a linear trajectory, nor does memory. It sinks into the fibres without a temporal pattern and crosses generations, going back and forth between past, present and future. Gabriel’s process chronicles the multifaceted dimensions of these journeys, exorcising trauma through sound, installation and performance, embracing cultural legacies and collective memories as a form of healing.

The works exhibited at Artissima expose how visions and representations of people and places as radically “other” than ourselves depend mostly on power relations that are often difficult to break or reverse. Jermay Michael Gabriel reminds us through his works, and through his approach to artistic research, of the fatigue involved in reversing the gaze from the margins, as the power relations that constituted them can seem ultimately indelible. We can thus still aspire to a critical understanding of these power relations and our role within them.