TALES AND DREAMS

BY Mekbib Tadesse

Tales and Dreams begins with images, but it is not only about images.

The works in this exhibition are generated using artificial intelligence. They resemble photographs, paintings, and constructed scenes, yet they do not originate from a camera, a studio, or a single moment in time. Instead, they emerge from systems trained to recognize patterns, associations, and structures across vast collections of visual data.

What we see here is not simply a new medium, but a shift in how images come into being.

Mekbib Tadesse’s practice has long been concerned with the constructed nature of images. Photography, in his work, has never been a neutral record. It has been a space where meaning is shaped—through framing, staging, and intention. In this exhibition, that construction becomes more explicit.

These images do not document. They assemble.

They do not capture a moment. They simulate one.

And yet, they remain strangely familiar.

They draw from visual languages we recognize—portraiture, symbolism, gesture—while removing the conditions that traditionally produce them. What is left is something both convincing and unstable: an image that appears to hold meaning, but asks the viewer to complete it.

In this way, the work shifts part of the authorship outward.

The system produces the image.

The viewer produces its significance.

At the same time, something else becomes visible through their absence. These images do not carry the same trace of time, labor, or physical process that has historically been embedded in art-making. There is no surface that records hesitation, no material that resists the hand. The relationship between effort and outcome is altered.

What, then, are we responding to when we look at them?

Rather than answering this, Tales and Dreams holds the question open.

At Artawi Gallery, this exhibition is part of a broader intention: to create space for conversations that extend beyond simplified positions. The gallery does not take a stance for or against AI. Instead, it treats this moment as one that requires attention, discussion, and multiple perspectives.

The exhibition is accompanied by a public program, including a panel discussion, where artists, thinkers, and practitioners from different fields will engage with these questions from their own positions.

What is at stake is not only a new tool, but a changing understanding of images themselves—how they are made, how they are read, and what they mean within a specific cultural context.

The questions remain open.

About the Artist

Mekbib Tadesse (b. 1990, Addis Ababa) is an Ethiopian visual artist whose practice moves between photography, constructed imagery, and emerging digital processes. His work is grounded in an ongoing inquiry into how images are formed, and how they shape the way we understand ourselves and our surroundings.

With a background in business and graphic design, Tadesse approaches image-making as a deliberate act of construction. Across portraiture, fashion, and conceptual work, he has consistently explored the relationship between perception and reality—questioning what an image shows, and what it leaves out.

His work has been exhibited both locally and internationally, including at Photoville, Sharjah Art Museum, and Alliance Ethio-Française, and he was a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts.

In his recent practice, Tadesse turns toward artificial intelligence—not as a break from photography, but as a continuation of his interest in how images are constructed. His current work explores the shifting boundaries between authorship, memory, and visual culture, raising questions about what it means to make an image at a time when the process itself is changing.