There exists a particular dignity in the way Kiya Tadele describes her family art collective’s process of creating works. “Our artwork remains pure to the collective memory of my family and my country,” said Tadele. “It is the recognition that Ethiopian art is not simply a collection of ancient artifacts, but a living narrative, which also carries on today.” This distinction sits at the heart of Yatreda’s practice, where the group creates moving works that resist being mere documentation and instead become acts of reverence.
For their Paris Photo 2025 solo presentation, Yatreda unveils a series of black and white motion portraits unified under the theme Kibir - those who are honoured and those who bestow glory. Following their residency at the Toledo Museum of Art, where their House of Yatreda transformed the institutional space into something approaching a shrine to Ethiopian cultural heritage, this new presentation examines the lores of respect that bind generations. The journeys of the past unfold in parallel with the lives of the people to whom they belong. Though Yatreda’s media are manifold, they skillfully navigate the delicate terrain of remembrance, sometimes drawing from unsettled sources that animate Ethiopia’s long-forgotten stories of queens, glorified ones, and ancient realms. Beneath it all, a core of digital preservation and shared recollection remains, poised as a future palimpsest.
The slow, deliberate movements of their subjects, barely perceptible until one stands before them for several moments, bring to life something fundamentally temporal: a once-fractured narrative, accumulated through endurance and stitched into the fabric of a multi-generational story.
In Amharic, kibir means honour, but it also carries a deeper sense of duty to what came before. It’s this spirit that guides Yatreda’s presentation. The monochromatic motion portraits are not displayed as digital curiosities but as living continuations of ancient traditions. Each figure depicted is a glorified one remembered, and a memory made present once again.