Tsige Tafesse is an art worker based in London. At Serpentine, she is part of the Arts Technologies R&D team, where she contributes to the development of experimental infrastructures for art and worldmaking. Her practice is rooted in the relational- curating, producing, and dreaming with others across disciplines, geographies, and timelines. She holds an MA from SOAS, University of London, and a BFA from Parsons, The New School. Tafesse has been supported by fellowships and residencies at Eyebeam, the Ford Foundation’s New Media Leaders cohort, NYU Tandon (Scholar-in-Residence), Brooklyn Community Foundation, NEW INC at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Arts Leadership Praxis program. Over the past decade, she has developed programs and platforms with Processing Foundation, The Kitchen, New Museum, TED, The Africa Center, The New School, and Young Women Empowered (Y-WE), weaving together pedagogy, care-based technologies, and community-led infrastructures. She was a cofounder of artist collective BUFU: By Us For Us. Tafesse has shared work and conversation with spaces including MoMA, MoMA PS1, Art Basel Hong Kong, OpenAI and Strada Gallery, SXSW, Eyeo Festival, Creative Time Summit X, Seattle Art Museum, Rubin Museum, Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Recess, Transmediale, School for Poetic Computation, Data&Society, NYU, Princeton, Abrons Art, Afrotectopia, Vera List Center, MoCA, and others. Her writing traces speculative memory and digital resistance, with highlighted essays published in On Mind (The Kitchen), Software for Artists Book (Pioneer Works), SOAS Art and Politics in Africa Journal. She has been recognized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA 100), and featured in Frieze, Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Artsy, FADER, Ebony, i-D, NYLON, Posture, VICE/i-D, Cult Classic, and Autostraddle.

Jermay Michael Gabriel is an Italian-Eritrean-Ethiopian artist whose experimental and multifaceted practice deeply explores themes of identity, memory, and transformation. His work unfolds like a complex stratigraphy, reminiscent of ancient architectures worn by time, where hidden traces resurface: fragments of stories seemingly condemned to oblivion. These layers, both material and symbolic, establish a constant dialogue between the visible and the invisible, between what is concealed and what unexpectedly emerges. His research investigates the epistemological constructions between Europe and Africa, decanonizing the European colonial imagination and its multiple stratifications. Through the use of archival materials, architectural references, and hybrid visual languages – spanning performance, photography, and installation – Gabriel examines the intersections of identity, the body, and collective memory. An implicit question runs through his work: are these stories destined to remain buried under the dust of time, or will they resurface to be observed, interpreted, and continually reread? The tension between the act of burying and that of revealing lies at the core of his poetics, which resists definitive answers and invites the viewer to engage with the unspeakable and the unexpressed. Through sound and installation, Gabriel constructs layered, non-linear narratives, creating a true archive of memories and traces where past, present, and future intertwine. His work challenges the gaze to decipher images suspended between objectivity and illusion, between the tangibility of memory and the suspicion of doubt.

Tsedaye Makonnen is an interdisciplinary artist-curator whose work spans across performance, sculpture, textile, installation, and film. Born in Washington, D.C., to Ethiopian immigrants, she draws on her East African heritage, Black feminist theory, diasporic knowledge systems and spiritual technologies, birthwork and migration studies to create works that center social justice and foster greater global equity. Closely connected to, yet distinct from, her sculptural work, Makonnen’s performance practice has received international recognition. In 2019, as a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, she staged When Drowning Is the Best Option at the Venice Biennale, a performance addressing global migration and displacement, honoring Black life. She returned in 2022 as part of Loophole of Retreat: Venice, a global Black woman convening organized in conjunction with Simone Leigh’s U.S. Pavilion, contributing a multimedia performance that centered Blackness across bodies of water and borders while exploring care, freedom, and diasporic world-making. Her installations have also been included in major museum exhibitions in the United States, including Africa and Byzantium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ethiopia at the Crossroads at the Walters Art Museum. She currently has a solo exhibition titled Sanctuary :: መቅደስ :: Mekdes at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.