Jermay Michael Gabriel at ArtNoble Gallery, Milan

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So we are all.”
James Baldwin, Notes on a Native Son

ArtNoble Gallery is pleased to present Cose Bizzarre, Jermay Michael Gabriel’s (Addis Abeba, 1997) first solo exhibition in Italy, curated by Elisa Giuliano.

Cose Bizzarre is an exhibition that as a whole exposes 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 ultima-tely indelible. We can thus still aspire to a critical understanding of these power relations and our role within them. Jermay Michael Gabriel stimulates and instigates this precious understanding by actively and materially intervening in the visual paradigms that, though created in the past, continue to fuel dominant ideologies in the present.

Cose Bizzarre takes its name from an expression often used by the voiceover of Istituto Luce documentaries to describe the objects, clothing, houses, rituals and customs of the indigenous peoples encountered in Ethiopia and Eritrea by Italians. The word “bizarre” has an uncertain etymology, but historically it has represented the strangeness, originality, and extravagance of “wild”-agile, quick, energetic, and unpredictable thinking, like a fairy that inspires awe.

Jermay Michael Gabriel’s works in fact expose a set of codes that aim to transcend the paradigms of history, revealing instead a genealogy that is more universal, but also deeply personal. Through their play with absence and presence, with form and being-formed, with doing and being-done, the works presented in Cose Bizzarre show how sensory perception and cognition are situated both materially and historically, venturing, however, to provide information about the future through a critical understanding of the past and present.

From Cose Bizzarre by Elisa Giuliano