Born and raised in the capital’s central district of Merkato — near the landmark often referred to as Cinema Ras — Addis Ababa has long shaped the life and work of Eyob Kitaba. In this densely woven neighborhood, where the sound of worship drifts through crowded lanes and commerce continues deep into the night, he was born 47 years ago into a setting defined by constant motion.
That atmosphere — restless, communal and unceasing — formed the backdrop of his early years and would later become a recurring subject in his art.
From a young age, Eyob gravitated toward drawing and painting, developing an ambition to become a full-time visual artist. His work, he says, seeks to bridge generations, translating memories of earlier urban life into visual forms that resonate with contemporary audiences.
He traces the origins of his practice to primary school. As a third-grade student, he began sketching scenes inspired by Ethiopian childhood traditions, including the seasonal gift-giving associated with Enkutatash. What began as an exercise in observation evolved into a sustained artistic inquiry. Today, his work examines the rhythms of urban life, where personal memory and the passage of time intersect in a visual language marked by movement and transition.
Over the past two decades, Eyob has built a career as a full-time artist, mounting four solo exhibitions and participating in more than 15 group shows in Ethiopia and abroad. His latest exhibition, “Beneath the Roof,” opened on March 26, 2026, at the Gebre Kristos Desta Center, presenting more than 70 works.
The collection ranges widely in scale, from intimate canvases measuring 30 by 40 centimeters to expansive mural-like compositions stretching up to 2 by 10 meters. Many of the works are created on corrugated iron — both reclaimed and newly sourced — underscoring the material realities of the city itself.
“Beneath the Roof” draws on decades of observation, assembling visual narratives of shifting living conditions in the capital. Eyob’s multidisciplinary approach — spanning painting, sculpture, photography, sound and installation — incorporates materials gathered from across the city, including metal sheets, architectural fragments and everyday objects. These elements are reconfigured into layered compositions that engage with memory, displacement and transformation.
At the center of his practice is a sustained focus on the evolution of urban space. His work examines the tension between the city’s past and its rapidly changing present, using architectural forms as both subject and metaphor.
“The city is the true reflection of my life, as it is for many,” he said. He described the exhibition as an attempt to register a sense of unease. “Today, as I observe my surroundings, it feels as though people, objects and streets are being absorbed into a single, indistinct hue — unsettled by a turbulence of destruction and rebirth.”
He said the pace of change in Addis Ababa prompted him to organize the exhibition as a way of engaging the public and recalling earlier forms of urban life.
In response, many of the works incorporate corrugated metal sheets salvaged from construction sites and demolition areas, painted in muted greens and yellows to evoke altered landscapes. Earlier panels depict human figures embedded within processes of urban transformation, while installations feature objects recovered from dismantled homes — doors, brooms and fragments of furniture — arranged as material traces of displacement.
Together, these elements form densely layered compositions, reflecting a city in flux and the fragments it leaves behind.
Eyob, a lecturer at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, where he also coordinates the M.F.A. program and serves on the Academic Council, said the exhibition has drawn visitors who recognize the city’s shifting landscape across different political and developmental eras. Many, he noted, are familiar with earlier state-led housing programs as well as redevelopment initiatives that accelerated after the 2005 Ethiopian general election.
The works also reflect more recent forms of displacement, including relocations tied to corridor development projects that have moved residents from inner-city neighborhoods to the urban periphery.
Eyob said the exhibition resonates across generations. Two of the pieces — constructed from corrugated iron and ceiling materials — are particularly personal, tracing his own sense of identity across time.
“Change is inevitable,” he said. “However, the exhibition unfolds as a kind of passage, echoing the transformations of Addis Ababa itself. Within this gathering of remnants, one can sense both a marking of an ending and an invitation to engage with a form of nostalgia that is active and reflective, rather than merely sentimental.”
Yet, he argues, transformation should not come at the expense of memory. For Eyob, the possibility of renewal depends on acknowledging what came before.
“That is what I aim to convey in ‘Beneath the Roof,’” he said, describing the exhibition as a meditation on continuity. Each roof, he added, shelters a distinct family history — lives shaped by successive waves of urban change. His works, composed of corrugated iron and ceiling fragments, stage a visual negotiation with modern development, allowing past and present to coexist within the same frame.
For the exhibition’s curator, Jermay Michael Gabriel, the project operates as what he described as a dispositif — an arrangement through which material memory is both organized and made visible. Central to this approach is Eyob’s use of kornis, a traditional ceiling framework that once defined the interiors of many Ethiopian homes.
Constructed by repeatedly layering plaster-soaked fabric, these ceilings created an intermediary space where dust accumulated over decades, alongside the traces of everyday life.
“Eyob’s artistic practice emerges as an act of preservation and reactivation of memory,” the curator said. “He rescues these ceiling frames from destruction brought about by rapid urban change, transforming them into aesthetic objects and historical witnesses that hold within them a quiet persistence against forgetting.”
Jermay says that Eyob’s role extends beyond that of a painter. He becomes, instead, a mediator between ruin and representation. Weathered plaster and rusted corrugated iron are treated as “involuntary paintings,” shaped over time by exposure, humidity and decay. By repositioning these fragments within the gallery, the exhibition resists simplified portrayals of African urban life, presenting instead a layered and evolving reality — one in which the ceiling above a child’s bed can remain both a site of imagination and a silent record of transformation.
For Meron Getu, a fourth-year student at Addis Ababa University’s Department of Business and Economics, the exhibition became something more personal: a reflection of her own experience of displacement.
Visiting the gallery on opening day, Meron Getu found herself standing before the towering corrugated panels, overcome by a sudden sense of recognition. The textures, layered and weathered, did not read to her as purely aesthetic decisions but as fragments of a city she felt was slipping out of reach — a city increasingly unrecognizable within the span of her own young adulthood.
Her response closely echoed the tensions at the center of Eyob’s practice. While she acknowledged, as the artist does, that transformation is an inevitable feature of a growing city, she was struck by the scale of what is erased in the process. Moving through installations composed of salvaged doors and plaster ceiling frames, she described a sense of absence — the disappearance of familiar landmarks and lived spaces — that has made memory itself feel urgent, even resistant.
“It feels as though the city I grew up in is being replaced by something I don’t yet know,” she said, reflecting a broader unease about how to locate the present without a stable sense of the past.
For Meron, the exhibition offered a rare site of reckoning — a space in which what Eyob has described as a “nameless turbulence” becomes legible. Discarded materials are not only preserved but reactivated, allowing a younger generation to navigate between childhood memory and an altered urban landscape.
Looking ahead, Eyob said he hopes to extend the life of the work beyond the gallery. His aim is to bridge public exhibition with academic practice, documenting projects across multiple media and integrating them into the education system. By doing so, he seeks to encourage emerging artists to draw from their immediate environments rather than looking outward for validation.
Focusing on local realities, he argued, offers a pathway to engaging broader human conditions.
“If you are a creator,” he said, “you transform adversity into opportunity.”
