Ethiopia’s rich history is characterized by its ancient endogenous civilizations and religious traditions. These are passed on for generations through oral history and inscriptions of written languages. Ancient languages include Sabean, which is no longer in use; the Ge’ez now only used in the Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, Arabic in the Harari region for qur’anic worship and Amharic, which has been the official national language since the twelfth century. Due to geographical proximity various societies in Ethiopia are among the earliest to be exposed to and to accept both Christianity and Islam, in the 4th and 7th century respectively. 

Both religions continued to evolve until modern and present-day Ethiopia with the unique particularities of the local interpretation of both religions. The emergence and expansion of these missionarising religions since the medieval periods is one facet of the recorded history of religions in Ethiopia. But various communities persisted in maintaining regional religious and cultural traditions, such as the practice of Waaqeffanna of the Oromo and their social ethics of Safuu, rather than adopting incoming religions and institutional politics. Peoples and ethnicities from the southern part of Ethiopia, for example the Konso people known for their sculpture known as Waka carved from wood, are also among many who maintained their indigenous beliefs and motifs. Attributable to its geographical set up in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia’s encounters with foreign and colonial powers are a prominent part of its past. The settlement history of communities and ethnicities and their internal conflicts recurrently surfaced in power struggles and wars waged in the country. Dr Yerasework Kebede Hailu (2020) states that:

“Historically, Ethiopian identity has delineated from different perspectives: the Aksumite perspective, which presents an understanding of Ethiopia as an African Christian society; the Orientalist Semitic perspective, highlighting Ethiopia as Abyssinia; the Pan-Africanist, Garveyism and diasporic perspective, presenting Ethiopia as a symbol of African political freedom; and the Rastafarian perspective, featuring Ethiopia as the home of the Lion of Juda“ (Hailu, University of South Africa, 2020). These perspectives served as the fertile bedrocks for the existence of rich plural societal and national values. Endogenous spiritual aspirations were enriched by new religious traditions while patriotism mined legends from ancestral oral heritage. Traditional knowledge systems, drawn from regionally diverse cosmologies, converge in many of the local narratives, which play a significant role in shaping modern and modernist art in Ethiopia.

The visual vocabulary of Boghossian’s art references legends and traditions from Ethiopia as well as referencing pan-Africanist histories and cultures as well as Négritude. Contemporary scholarship by Giorgis and international collections acknowledge his practice as one of the most prominent contributions to Ethiopian modernism. A powerful aspect of his practice is his exploration of mysticism, which he refers to as the “non-real”, into his paintings. 

The work Timkat from 1967 refers to an Orthodox Christian festival [FIG 02]. Its liturgies stem from King Solomon’s time and were held in Lalibela, a holy site since the 12th century with eleven churches carved into volcanic rock. Boghossian’s painting represents the procession of clergy who are traditionally covering the sacred ark of covenants or tabbots with umbrellas. Boghossian employs these to form a dense figural pattern, which at the same time reminds of the intense organic repetitive mark making of Telsem paintings. 

Upholding the concept of Afro-metaphysics, the harmonising of the material and spiritual aspects of reality, Boghossian visualizes metaphysical imagery through figural elements, which through layering form patterns. In the gouache Twilight Braves he combines the metaphysical circle of the pan-African uroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail or the cyclic transition of day and night from the Egyptian symbolic union of Ra and Osiris, with the dense layering of tilflif, a complex braid-design motif often found in Coptic painting [FIG 03]. A notable example of Coptic Ethiopian art can be found at the Lalibela churches in the provinces of Lasta, Shoa, Gojjam, Wollo, Gondar and Tigray. As Georg Gerster comments on the Lasta design “the church is decorated with themes and details of Coptic art of the Fatimid period on the ceilings “. 

Boghossian also frequently employed motives of the Aksum obelisks, 4th century monolithic steles in the neighbouring site of Aksum [FIGs 04 and 05]. The End of the Beginning depicts the burning of Aksum and Lalibela, two historically significant sites in Ethiopia. The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian describes the painting in their collection: “Here, the artist-seer prefigures the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 and illustrates the overturning of church and imperial hegemony in modern Ethiopia. The white bird in the center, poised as a phoenix, is witness to and survivor of the destruction, while the spirit figure on the right represents the past hoping to escape the violent present.”

Kosrof’s earliest practice was influenced by his formal training at the Addis Ababa Fine Art School that capitalizes on traditional and naturalistic presentation of subject matters. He then moved on to the study of iconographic study of the motives used in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido church. His search and experimentation on making use of the icons, motifs, forms, sounds and images incrusted the visual language he incarnated in the Amharic/ Ge’ez alphabets.

Rooted in the ancient civilizations of Ethiopia, the Ge’ez alphabet, currently used for liturgical purposes in the Tewahido church, is among the very few original scripts. “Among the Ethiopic languages, one of the languages that face ambiguity of words is Geez.” Ge’ez, ግዕዝ also known as “Ethiopic” by some, is an ancient South Semitic language that arose in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea on the Horn of Africa (Alemu et al, 2023a, 2023b). Later it was adopted as the official language of the Kingdom of Aksum and the Ethiopian imperial court. Ge’ez is now solely used in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the Ethiopian Catholic Church, and the Beta Israel Jewish community. But Ge’ez is also considered an extinct sister language of the contemporary Ethopian languages Tigre and Tigrinya and Amharic (Demilie et al, 2022, Kassa, 2018). The Amharic alphabet is a direct replica of the Ge’ez. But Kosrof does not make that link himself. Instead he refers to Amharic. He gradually mastered the ‘Word Play’ of images using this alphabet into abstractions. This ensures that his modernist approach disseminates Ethiopian cultural values (Merawi, Mekonnen, 2018) while also exploring personal, continental and global views on political matters such as migration. In addition to painting, Kosrof expansively employs other mediums like sculpture and mixed media in which he continually makes use of Ethiopian alphabets [FIG 06]. 

Unlike many languages and their alphabets Ge’ez is etymologically unique for blending forms, sound and image. Consequently the language use of the Ge’ez alphabets serves communication, healing and spirituality. Another peculiarity of both Ge’ez and Amharic is Wax and Gold. The expression used to indicate a mode of speech relying on layered meanings [FIG 07]. The wax is the obvious and direct such as Ethiopia’s national identity, which it projects globally, and the gold is the idiomatically hidden, endogenous significance. Wossene Kosrof states about his own work:

As means to convey indigenous cosmologies, legends and storytelling are time-honored in many African societies. Artists refer to these particularist knowledge and belief systems in the conception of their vision of modernism. Zerihun Yetmgeta is among many who capitalized on prevalent traditions and historical narratives to create a modern artistic identity, when he worked on the story of Queen Sheba and King Solomon [FIG 09].

The meeting of Solomon, the ruler of Israel in the tenth century BC, with the queen of Sheba, alternatively  Bilqīs, a Sabean queen in modern Yemen or Makeda, ruler of D’mt kindom in northern Ethiopia, was narrated in one of the fundamental texts of Ethiopian kingship, the Kəbrä Nägäśt (The Glory of the Kings). The Kəbrä Nägäśt, in praise of the two royal figures, recounts the conversion to Judaism of the queen of Sheba, who, after returning to her country, gave birth to Menelik I, the son of Solomon and founder of the Ethiopian royal lineage.

The historian and critic Kifle Bitsea once mentioned that Yetmgeta is always inspired by the proverb based on Sankofa, a Ghanaian Adinkra verbal visual symbol, which became a pan-African decolonising mantra: “When we don’t know where we’re heading to; we’re obliged to look back to where came from”. Bitsea suggests that Zerihun Yetmgeta’s vision of modernism was highly influenced by reaping motifs of national and pan-African origin in particular  [FIG 10]. Yetmgeta understands the role of modern Ethiopian art in portraying national and continental traits. Esseye states, that “[…] it was because of the extraordinary desire to demonstrate the ability of a nation’s national art to inculcate and develop their own unique modern identity that is not an extension, auxiliary or dependent. As Zerihun wished and started it likewise, modern art became an endless symbol of identity created through freedom. That’s why national, popular and metaphoric images and forms whereby fantasist, spiritual and supernatural as well as dreamlike elements indicative of identity became apparent in his works” [FIG 11].

Since the mid-nineteenth century, all the greatest efforts of Ethiopia’s leaders who sought to modernize the country capitalized on either in uniting the nation to guard its sovereignty or in adapting teleological concepts of modernity. This process resulted in obscuring various indigenous knowledge systems across Ethiopia. Among the victims of such eclipses is Telsem Art for two central reasons. One factor is the exclusion of Telsem Art from the development of modern education systems, much like other indigenous knowledge systems. The other reason is the problematic omission or rejection of Telsem Art from the doctrines and teachings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, which is intermittently affiliated to the origin and progression of Telsem Art. The indirect influence of colonialism, even in the non-colonized Ethiopia, diminishes the role and value of indigenous knowledge systems. This could be seen as an additional factor for the exclusion of Telsem Art from modernism in Ethiopia. Consequently, Telsem Art has prolongedly and perplexedly been perceived as “Talismanic Art” and “Healing Art” of Ethiopia even though Telsem is a continuously modernizing format, which is more secular than its religious sources. 

Those who attribute the source of Telsem Art to the times of man’s origin, relate the extended materiality and spirituality to forms of healing exercised by human beings before the invention of scripts and numbers. The practice of Telsem Art is unquestionably thousands of years old and continues until the present day despite the controversy of its origin as well as its complex links to the doctrines and teachings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church.

Due to his general research interest on the various traditions and specifically on the practice of healing in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church, Jacques Mercier met both during the early 1980s. He furthered his curiosity on their practice and continued the patronage by availing chances so that they could showcase their works, mostly outside of Ethiopia and mainly in France. Though Gedeon Mekonnen and Gera Mewi Mezgebu began to continuously showcase their works in numerous exhibitions in Ethiopia from the 1990s their practice was not locally known and the local art discourses did not reflect the attention the works received internationally. By the time a few local art collectors began to collect their works Gedeon Mekonnen had passed away in 2001 and Gera Mewi Mezgebu in 2005. But in the early 2000s another Telsem Art giant, Henok Melkamzer, began to emerge. Since his childhood, Henok was mentored by his father Melkamzer Yihun.  He was a close friend, colleague and cofounder of the underground የግዕዝ ሊቃውንት ማሕበር (Ge’eze Elites Association) along with 13 other Ge’eze scholars, which included Gedeon Mekonnen and Gera Mewi Mezgebu. With some subtle similarities and differences to their practices, Henok Melkamzer’s aesthetic and fame inspired a younger generation of artists to study and practice Telsem Art. In conclusion, Telsem Art proves to be the most outstanding form of art virtuously shaped by indigenous cosmology that in turn influenced the passages of Ethiopian modernism from the perspectives of local narratives. This opens up another vast field of research of looking back to such values and knowledge systems and their impact on artistic modernization.