Film screening and public round table
How can film help us see histories that have long been hidden — from the forced labour on indigo plantations in Haiti to the influence of Christian missions on fashion in Namibia and Jamaica? Beyond documenting the past, film can challenge dominant narratives, unearth silenced voices, and spark new ways of thinking about heritage, memory, and Afro-Indigenous knowledge.
This special evening celebrates the finissage of the BCDSS exhibition Enmeshed and Entwined: Fabrics of Dependency. It begins with the screening of two films by Haitian archaeologist Sony Jean and the Global Heritage Lab’s Visual Anthropology Fellow Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen. The screenings will be followed by a conversation with curators Beatrix Hoffmann-Ihde (BCDSS) and Julia Binter (Global Heritage Lab), exploring how film can document, unmake, and reimagine the legacies of power and dependency. The audience is warmly invited to join the discussion and share drinks at the finissage.
Films: Dressing Resistance, 2025, 12 mins; The koutodigo: What a Tool Tells Us About Haitian Colonial History and Asymmetrical Dependency, 2024, 9 mins.
Conference
Is Less Still More? From Taxonomies to Entanglements
Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Binter will be presenting at the upcoming conference of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) in Köln. Their talk, Is Less Still More? From Taxonomies to Entanglements, will take place in the panel Uncommoning in Curatorial Practices.
Building on Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s analysis, they highlight how one of the pressing problems of museums today is a kind of “indigestion”: institutions have collected more cultural belongings than they can meaningfully process, creating what he calls a “choke,” an experience of epistemological overload. Rather than adding to this clutter, Mekonnen and Binter argue for the curatorial potential of exhibiting fewer objects.
They show that working with fewer objects can become a strategy of resistance; resisting colonial taxonomies, foregrounding individuality, and fostering richer entanglements with audiences. Drawing on their curatorial practice at the Lab, they reflect on the concepts and methods that guide this approach. Their work demonstrates how curating less opens up new ways of engaging, not through fixed categories or rigid taxonomies, but through the entanglements and contexts in which heritage thrives.
New exhibition
Dressing Resistance
The exhibition i help curated is now open at Poststraße 26 in Bonn. The exhibition features various artistic, academic perspectives and two of my recent films!
“ Dressing Resistance. Fashion and the Heritage of Mission explores how Christian missionisation has influenced fashion in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean – and how fashion designers and artists deal with this legacy today. The exhibition includes works by Tuli Mekondjo, Cheryl McIntosh, Amanda McIntyre, Loo Nascimento, and many more. Visitors are invited to take part in hands-on activities such as doll-making and weaving.
Dressing Resistance runs in dialogue with Enmeshed and Entwined, an exhibition by the BCDSS and BCDH, which explores global textile dependencies through multimedia and historical textiles.”
Conference Lab
Looking Back: A Practice of Counter-Gaze
I’m excited to be contributing to the Third Biennial Conference of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology (ENPA), taking place from June 11–13, 2025, at Universität Münster. The conference theme, Anthropologies and Psychologies in Inter/Action – Engaging Interdisciplinary Perspectives, offers an important space to rethink the ethics and methodologies of our disciplines.
As part of the program, I will be organizing a Walking Lab titled:
“Looking Back: A Practice of Counter-Gaze”
In this lab, I invite participants to explore the ethical and methodological implications of using audiovisual tools in fieldwork. As these technologies move from the periphery to the center of social research, we must also confront the hierarchies they often produce. The act of holding a camera—of framing and recording—can create a dynamic where the one behind the lens assumes authority, while the subject becomes objectified.
Through a series of experimental exercises, this Walking Lab will examine the power embedded in the act of looking, and ask what it means to reverse—or at least become aware of—this gaze. Together, we’ll explore how we might develop more reflexive and responsible modes of visual engagement in anthropological practice.
For more details, please visit the official ENPA 2025 conference page.
📍 June 11–13, 2025 | Universität Münster, Schlossplatz 2, 48149 Münster
Against the Tyranny of Text: Multimodal Unwriting of Ethnographic Museums
I will be presenting my paper, “Against the Tyranny of Text: Multimodal Unwriting of Ethnographic Museums,” at the 17th International SIEF Congress, taking place from June 3–6, 2025, at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
In this presentation, I critique the persistent reliance on textual representation in ethnographic museums and explore how written text continues to constrain the interpretive possibilities of heritage while reinforcing colonial narratives. Drawing on case studies from the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne, I argue that text often reduces the non-textual to a passive object—dependent on explanation and denied its own autonomy. This dynamic reflects broader binaries: active versus passive, masculine over feminine, colonizer over colonized—where the former retains the power to speak and observe, while the latter is rendered silent and visible only through another’s gaze.
My paper challenges these hierarchies and calls for a reclamation of sensoriality, proposing a multimodal approach that resists the dominance of text. To “unwrite” the museum is, for me, an emancipatory gesture—one that seeks more just and inclusive modes of representation.
The paper is part of the panel “Unwriting the Museum” and will be presented on Wednesday, June 4, from 9:00 to 10:45 AM.
If you’re attending SIEF 2025, I hope to see you there!
Read Further
Interviews, seminars, and talks
Where does the artist belong in the digital age?
yohannensMulatMekonnen
Øyepå Conference 2020, Oslo
This year's curator Nicole Rafiki concluded Øyepå in a conversation with the artists Yohannes Mekonnen and Ilavenil Jayapalan , to stake out the future course in the program item "The Room of Opportunity". Rafiki is himself an artist and photographer, and all three work within different disciplines and use digital tools in their work. Together, they represent new, young artists with different backgrounds in terms of culture and career path, who work actively with digital media to reach out broadly and variedly.
They discussed the terms digital art and digital art dissemination, and what opportunities and threats exist for artists in the digital sphere.
But digital is also art:
- All art tools are an extension of the artist himself, said Mekonnen, whether it's a pencil or a computer. He compared the digital to light, which can be a tool to make something visible, or an art to be seen in itself.
Full Article
The Meaning of Color
Seminar, Oslo, 9 Nov 2021
In the spring and summer of 2020, #Blacklivesmatter protests brought youth into the streets in high numbers; also in Norway. Alongside intensified anti-racist engagements, the volume in counter-narratives challenging anti-racism also increased. "In societies convinced of their post-racial status, racism is always something else, and happens somewhere else", as Gavan Titley asserts. In Norway, racist speech, actions and structures are clearly present but personal experiences of racism are met with counter-arguments, belittling or outrage even today. Thus, interpersonal and public acknowledgement of people's lived experience is still badly needed in order to address structural racism in society. Please note: this event has been changed, and will only be held physically. However, an audio recording will be posted the day after.
The PRIO Centre on Culture and Violent Conflict and the PRIO Migration Centre invite you to a seminar on how racialized individuals navigate everyday confrontations with structural racism. Laura Führer, Yohannes Mekonnen and Harmeet Kaur will present their artistic and research explorations on the question of how racialized individuals — born in Norway or migrated from elsewhere — navigate majority understandings of 'color'.
Listen to the seminar here or
The right to be remembered
Podcast
Fotogalleriet Oslo
Dec,2021
In episode 2, we discuss the “right to be remembered” with research librarian and social anthropologist Michelle Tisdel and contemporary artist Yohannes Mekonnen.
Through the creation of national collections and archives, and institutions such as libraries and museums to house and disseminate them, nation states and other groups which wish to lay claim to power have produced and disseminated dominant historical narratives which have come to shape our self-perception and understanding of the world and its power structures and relations.
How do archives or national collections come into being, and who initiates them? Can archives or collections ever be fully representative? How have materials concerning Pan-African movements in the 20th century ended up in the Norwegian National Library? Do communities and individuals which archival materials concern have access to them on the same level as institutions and academics? What are the consequences of ones history being collected, categorised, and administered by someone else, or somewhere else?
the podcast
Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen
Painting and moving images are central to the works you present here. Is there a reason why you have chosen this form of expression?
- Yes, one reason is that I can paint. Another reason is related to how the world is seen differently through the camera lens and the painting. Through the optical look you get in film and photography, you get a mechanical and more indifferent look. While the painting - I think - follows my inner rhythm. When I paint, the mistakes and uncertainty become part of the process. And I think that fits what I want to say.
Read the article here
I think the same can be said in the making of an artwork. The making is not a process of materializing preconceived ideas. However, the artwork emerges from the reality and challenge of the material at hand.
At least, in my case this is one of the strategies that I use. I try to collect a variety of materials, in relation to the theme of my project. Then the art work takes its form in the process of bridging the distance between the materials collected in the studio. In this process, one of the things which becomes more visible is the more polarized the material is, the stronger the synthesis will be.
full article here
Join me in my creative zone
My studio at Speicher 2, Münster, Germany, hosts a variety of events, including workshops, reading groups, screenings, and Open studio. If you would like to join for any of these activities, please send a message.
The available activities are listed as follows: