By Julie Mehretu 

On a clear midsummer day in Addis Ababa, my friend Dagmawi Woubshet drove us up to Mount Entoto, the highest peak of the Entoto mountains and the founding site of the city. The entire city of Addis is situated in these verdant Ethiopian highlands sprawling over the hillsides and valleys. They are covered in eucalyptus trees, a primary, regenerative fuel source brought to the country initially by emperor Menelik II and planted during the years of Haile Selassie. Considered sacred land, Entoto is also the site of the historic imperial court and numerous monasteries and churches. Every time I have travelled up to Entoto from Addis, it feels as if travelling through the atomisation of time, memory and cosmology. Ascending into the clouds, literally but also viscerally, a source of knowledge and history is provoked on a cellular level, sensually, activated by the trees, earth, air, scents. 

Entoto is the home of the painter Henok Melkamzer. He, Elizabeth Giorgis and a few others were outside when we arrived. I vividly remember that entire visit—his contagious smile, deep dark eyes and quiet demeanour, not shy, just still like a Boddhisatva. Henok welcomed us with such ease and grace. After greeting everyone, he sat back down on his tall stool leaning on the wall of his house. He didn’t say much in words, but smiled warmly and nodded his head in a bowing gesture each time I tried to speak to him or look in his direction. You could smell the eucalyptus crispness in the air and hear the children playing outside nearby. Henok exuded a kind of fierce confidence and humility simultaneously, not uncommon in Ethiopia. 

After some time taking in the sun and catching up, he took us into his studio and slowly began to bring certain paintings outside into the bright light. These were intricate, potent, exuberantly coloured meticulous paintings of eyes, entangled in shapes, geometries and vines, dotted with numbers and symbols. These details are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Ethiopian Coptic illuminated manuscripts or even the kitsch market trinkets that borrow from that language. The history of ‘telsem’ painting as talismanic healing art and esoteric epistemology, however, predates all of that. I was struck by how different the logic of these paintings felt and the power they held as reverberating objects—resplendent, circuitous and exacting in their abstracted forms. The elaborate, labyrinthian paintings are first drawn in pencil or black ink, then some are painted densely with colour while others are more sparsely painted with colour to accentuate vital nodes. The sheer immensity of the scope of cosmological sensibility and space in these modestly scaled, shamanistic yet deftly contemporary paintings, is staggering. 

Henok told us very little of what he was making or how. Through Elizabeth and Dagmawi, I learned about his father and grandfather as ‘telsem’ painters and his inheritance of this somewhat secret historical language and philosophy. However, his paintings also felt completely fresh and different from anything I had ever seen before. Henok’s work, while pulling from a long history of world-making and knowledge, is also of this moment, time and place, and some of the strongest new work I had seen on this trip in Ethiopia. 

Since I began making art, I have relentlessly studied epistemologies outside western rational secular, ‘scientific’ modernities: traditional Ethiopian ‘telsem’ painting, ancient Egyptian stelae and wall reliefs, the fourth- and fifth-century Buddhist caves of Dunhuang in western China, the history of Yantra painting in India and the various epistemologies of Indigenous Americans from both continents. These multivarious forms of visuality, methods and philosophies have informed aspects of who I am as an artist and my understanding of contemporary practice, thinking and painting. I have drawn from all these forms of knowledge as sources in my work and process. As we have witnessed and experienced the failures of utopian modernity, the nation-state and neoliberalism that is rapidly putting our species and planet at risk, many of us are turning to other forms of knowledge to conceive of and invent new radical liberatory practices to open alternative possibilities and futurities. As Elizabeth will deftly argue, there is no reason to think of ‘telsem’ painting and Henok’s work outside of the history of modernity and contemporaneity.

Art, music, literature, poetry and dance participate progressively in the construction of every nuanced aspect of our contemporaneity and futurity, fusing parts of our past with new inventions. Henok’s paintings are made to actively heal and treat us—as individuals and societies, as species and planet. He pulls from his inherited language and epistemology to do so while also creating a vivid and dazzling new form of ‘telsem’ painting and aesthetics in contemporary Ethiopia. 

This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the exhibition Henok Melkamzer: Telsem Symbols and Imagery, on view at Sharjah Art Museum from 24 February to 16 June 2024.