OVERVIEW
NIGHT AND DAY centers on Ethiopian journalist and author Baalu Girma's controversial 1983 Amharic novel Oromay, written under Ethiopia’s Derg regime and banned shortly after publication. Drawing on artist Eric Gottesman's longstanding engagement with the novel, the exhibition considers how artists create and sustain cultural memory within and against conditions of censorship, political repression, and state violence.
The exhibition's title reflects Girma's divided existence. By day, he worked at his desk writing propaganda for the Derg; by night, at his kitchen table, he wrote fiction on yellow legal pads. In Oromay, Girma transformed this duality into a literary strategy, blending fact and fiction and drawing on Ethiopian poetic traditions like qine to encode political meaning beneath the surface of his prose, saying one thing while also saying another. Oromay stands as both a case study and a blueprint for fiction's capacity to interrogate power under oppressive political regimes.
Since 2011, Gottesman has developed a series of translations, interpretations, and adaptations of Oromay. In 2012, working with Yawoinshet Masresha and Girma's family, he co-published the first authorized translation of an excerpt of the novel, and only the second translation of any Amharic novel into English. He has since collaborated with designers, artists, writers, and filmmakers across Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the United States to translate the novel and the story of its author into photography, video installation, workshops, works on paper, and sculpture.
NIGHT AND DAY asks a question Gottesman considers particularly urgent in the United States today: what can we do with a banned book? Using translation, strategies of doubling, and reciprocal viewing, the exhibition explores art’s capacity to challenge repression and imagine what Gottesman calls a politics of possibility. The works connect the risks of artistic expression under Ethiopia’s Derg regime to contemporary threats to freedom of expression in the United States.
Spanning two decades of Gottesman's practice, the exhibition brings together photography, video, sculpture, and works on paper. Its title work, NIGHT AND DAY / ቅነ ጥሬጰዛ is a kinetic sculpture created with designer Jomo Tariku and artist Adiskidan Ambaye. Baalu Girma's Portrait, a video installation — featuring interviews with Girma’s wife, his daughter, and his best friend — offers a rare, intimate portrait of the man behind the novel. Flag incorporates screenprinting on pages of the banned novel. Additional works include the films Colonel's Mirror (2017) and Elilta and Fiammeta (2026); My Flesh and My Soul, spanning 2012 to 2026; and Absence (2006), a redacted stack of C-41 photographic prints made in Ethiopian photography studios.
The works in this exhibition include collaborations with Jomo Tariku, Daniel Debebe Negatu, Yoni Brook, Adiskidan Ambaye, Tegegn Samuel, and Yawoinshet Masresha, and others.
This exhibition is made possible with support from the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at UMBC and Project& Evolving Democracy Fellowship. Additional support for the Oromay Projects from Magnum Foundation, Creative Capital, Guggenheim Foundation.
BACKGROUND
This exhibition is part of For Freedoms’ three-year Residency in Washington D.C., launched in September 2024 in partnership with the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University. Anchored by the theme of interdependence, the residency fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among artists, students, faculty, museum staff, encouraging innovative and accessible approaches to artistic research and public practice. Now entering its final year, the residency has evolved into a Civic Arts Lab, an active space for civic and cultural inquiry and artistic experimentation, and collective learning.
