DIARY: OUT OF AFRICA

[...] Contrastingly, Addis Fine Art opted for a two-pronged strategy—showing at both 1-54 and Frieze. At the former, they featured four artists of the Ethiopian diaspora: Tsedaye Makonnen, Tariku Shiferaw, Helina Metaferia, and Tsefaye Urgessa, all based abroad and seeking a deeper connection with the African art scene. At the Regent’s Park tent, they showed the Ethiopian Merikokeb Berhanu, whose colorful, semiabstract paintings merging inner and outer worlds they reckoned would appeal to a Western audience. “Berhanu is one of those artists [where we thought] the bigger the stage, the more recognition she’ll get,” Ikenna Malbert, program and artist manager at Addis Fine Art, told me. “And we were right: She sold out in the first few hours at Frieze.” [...]