Korkoro & Anqelba art
The emergence of a new medium

By Alemayehu Seife Selassie

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – There are some tendencies of redundancy in the Addis Ababa painting exhibition scenes. One thing that is common is the mode of the media itself. But the launch of one particular exhibition seems to have brought a landmark in the painting exhibition scenes. The works of artist Martina Anagnostou seems to shout, “Who said you need to have stretched canvas to do your paintings?”

Having worked with old window frames in Pakistan Islamabad, the 35-year-old Martina is not new to a unique form of medium. But the paintings on a corrugated iron sheet and leather baby pouches (traditionally known as anqelba) are unique even by her standards. “Usually I took the photocopy of my pictures and enlarged them. But when I started photocopying the pictures from Ethiopia, the tattoos started fading. So I was lost, it took me a while to choose a different medium”, she reminisces on how the corrugated art was formed. Martina was driving, around Addis when she looked at all the rusting corrugated iron sheets; “I said there is it right in front of me”. But it took her a while to actually make the artistic paintings on corrugated sheets. “I had to remold the surface I used and when I found the source where they sold used anquelba, I wanted to use that too”, she said.

This artist however, did not want to use the new anquelbas for the used anquelba has the remnant of where the baby used to be in the folds. “Somebody has lived in that, just as the corrugated iron is rusty, it is used, it is lived in”, she states on the significance of her mediums.
“I went to Merkato and said “Ene korkoro efelegalehu” [I need some corrugated iron sheet]” But to her surprise, the korkoro [corrugated iron sheets] were quiet expensive even for a used korkoro. The rusty ones costing about 20 birr [~2 USD], and the less rusty ones, 30 Birr [~3 USD] she was in for a cost. “I wanted the rusty ones and it was very difficult to find those. And the guys in Merkato said “Ebid Ferenj” [crazy white woman] ‘why does she want to buy the rusted korkoro?’

Next to finding the rusted corrugated iron sheets, one task left for Martina was figuring out if it would accept the paints. “It accepted the paintings quick and I wanted the paintings to look old quickly. And the rusted korkoro gives it an old look quickly. Some have got holes in them. And I wanted the korkoro to have the rust and the anqelbas the smell”.
This artist who has stayed in Addis for a year and a half, came to Ethiopia with her husband who works at Medicines San Frontier (MSF). Also enrolled in MSF, this artist was working in two projects in the northern Ethiopia on the emergency medical relief. “When I first came to Ethiopia the tattoos on the forehead of the women have fascinated me. Previously, I was working with the symbols of male and female. And when I came here, I saw that women have the symbol of the sun or the symbol of female tattooed on their forehead. That was the first interesting element for my work”.

Martina’s first painting, a commercial sex worker breast feeding a baby at Humera, was sold to her colleague. The 40 works she did later on are however hanging at the ASNI gallery starting from last week.
All the paintings in this exhibition tell a true story of Humera and Abdurafi [Northern Amhara and Western Tigray] added with the artist’s imagination. “They live in a very very hard situation and they are still very hard people, they smile the way I smile and cry the way I cry. But they are suffering a lot. I am very much impressed by the stoic there”, Martina states.

The largest work that Martina has done is the one she did for her Masters of Art on a big plot of land in England. Making a work composed of 70 paintings each measured two by one meters; Martina worked for two years to make that one work of art which was the biggest. 70 paintings laid out on a big plot of land where fans had to go on top of a building to see the whole picture. The painting was called ‘Journey’. “Each one was accounting a day in my life”, the artist said stating the significance. But the over all picture of that large piece of work was a different one. “It was a Greek girl with two men on either side. It was a metaphor between East and West. The girl being a representation of the East, and the men being the pressures from the West. Some people were not able to see the little girl and it was too conceptual and frustrating for them”, Martina noted.

Martina has worked on different images of the same project. I was obsessed with the image of East as a little girl and West as an imposing. “It was about orientalization the Greek people were not seen as European.”
Usually the subject matter Martina uses are women and children, but for a change, on her exhibition in Ethiopia, she has represented men in a positive view. “Usually men in my work represent the West so they are evil. But Ethiopian men are interesting. Ethiopian men who work in the lowlands are not immune to kala azar [also known as black fever, a disease caused by parasites of the Leishmania genus. It is the second-largest parasitic killer in the world after malaria] and because they are alone and with no social structure, they go and visit the commercial sex workers, so HIV/AIDS is rampant in that area of the world it is 30 percent and much higher than the rest of the country. They are the population that MSF works with in that part of the world.”

This particular job as a campaigner for MSF seems to have fitted this artist’s vision of the West and East perfectly.
“What I was working on was about big pharmaceutical companies making new good medicines available for the developing world which they don’t do. Big pharmaceutical companies based in the West only make medicine for the Western diseases. And that is a battle I had to fight in my job.”
Having a much comfortable studio, Martina states that she will miss Addis Ababa very soon. As compared to the working on a living room with a plastic stretched wall to wall, her mud room which was falling apart with a korkoro ceiling was something she took comfort on. “Every night after my kids went to sleep, I put my MP3 player on and go work in my studio place because I work better at night.”

Working with the corrugated sheets Martina had to deal with the nature of the beast quiet frequently. And this form of medium took more than just her sweats. “I have been riped on several occasions. I have been wounded by my own work. But I like that. It is a reminder of the difficulties for people that work with korkoro and live with korkoro, the same with anqelba. It is a beautiful thing but it must be quiet hot and interesting for a baby to grow up in.”
The modes of the media are not however just interesting to look at, they also have more implication on the meaning as well. “It is a protection mechanism but it is also an entrapment mechanism. That why I called the exhibition as such, ‘Protection… Entrapment!!!’. It is a metaphor for the resettlement sights. The initial idea to take people to the resettlement sight is to protect them and better their food security. But in the end, they are trapped in an area where they don’t have food, no security no nothing.”

Working with a rusted iron, one thing that was eminent for Martina was taking a tetanus shot.
One of the installation art that is exhibited in the gallery is something which captivates viewers’ eyes. Here the measure for malnutrition “Weight for height board” is displayed through a window frame where chain and noose are hanging aside where a rope reaches out to the hall of the gallery where the rest of the paintings with smiling faces are hanged. “Lots of people commit suicide. And that rope depicts the fact that we are pulling the rope to the noose.” According to his artist, the chain on a wheel is a reminder of the vicious circle of poverty where some people are trapped in the chain of food insecurity. “That is an important piece which glued the whole exhibition. That is why there are babies and women represented in it”, she said.

Martina is booked to go to Moscow Russia by mid April. And stating what she would want to do with the paintings if they are not sold, she said, “If the korkoro paintings don’t get sold, I will give them to my colleagues at the office. But the anqelba I am taking home with me. I feel particularly attached to them.”
“For me, when I do one exhibition, that is it. But may be if I have a retrospective and I have an anquelba left, I will have it in the exhibition. But every time I am done with an exhibition I want to move to the next level”.

The next level for this artist is the type of art she majored in when she studied her art history, Byzantine art. “I have always been inspired by it. Ethiopia, Greece and Russia are the most powerful countries that have retained orthodox religious art. I am fascinated by the orthodox art”, she concludes.

March 30, 2007