Eric Gottesman
Tinsae

Artist Statement:

His name is Tinsae. Born in 1992, he is 13 years old and comes from a town called TEFKI located 40 kilometers from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He likes to swim and hates to cry. His future dream is to be an engineer in the future.
- A biographical statement written by Tinsae Muluneh in 2006

Tinsae is an installation based on my decade-long photographic conversation with Tinsae Muluneh – a boy living in a neighborhood in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Here at Real Art Ways, I bring viewers into our conversation by positioning them between the space in which the work is displayed and the context in which it was produced.

In this way, Tinsae maps how communication can exist between viewer, artist and subject inside an art gallery. "To communicate or have relations with people," writes Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics, "one needs tools." My tools, in Tinsae, include photography and video as well as collaborative pedagogy and conversation.

The process of communication takes the form, here, of a series of concentric circles. In the center of the circles is Tinsae's neighborhood, the cultural context in which Tinsae and I make images together. At the core is the "Sudden Flowers Archive," a custom built DJ cabinet filled with photographs. This object provides cultural context by sampling the experiences of the people that surround Tinsae.

Surrounding the archive is a circular gallery wall that I designed. The shape is inspired by the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, a local ritual that gathers people in conversation and social problem-solving. I have held public displays of my photographs in Ethiopia using a similarly shaped installation. In this space, viewers can sit, make themselves a cup of coffee, and pore over the archive at their own pace as they learn about Tinsae's environs.

Surrounding the circular wall is the outer wall of the gallery where viewers encounter Tinsae through my selection of his images, through my conversations with him. Viewers hear Tinsae's voice through me and can explore his experiences as a child whose parents died of AIDS, and then later as a creative, resilient young person emerging from the aftermath of trauma.

To achieve real communication inside the gallery, and to overcome the problematics of cultural difference and the fallibility of the document, I propose what American artist and AIDS activist Gregg Bordowitz defines as the reconciliation of foreignness and habit: intimacy. In my role as an artist, I see myself sometimes as a conduit or a translator, and seek to embody that reconciliation; in other words I seek to create intimacy between viewer and subject. In this show, I have transformed the gallery walls into conduits for intimacy. Viewers enter from the outside and are invited to spiral toward the core, observing first my encounters with Tinsae and eventually arriving at a sample of the world that surrounds him.

About the Artist:

Eric Gottesman studied law and politics and worked for a time in the office of the Chief Justice of the United States of America. He is now a collaborative artist and teacher working with photography, video, installation and performance. For the last ten years, he has been working with Sudden Flowers, an art collective in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia that he co-founded.

Gottesman has upcoming solo shows at TPW Gallery in Toronto (part of the 2011 Contact Photo Festival), Real Art Ways in Hartford, Conn. (July 2011), and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass. (September 2012, with Wendy Ewald). His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Johnson & Johnson Collection and various universities. His work has been supported by the Open Society Institute, the Opportunity Fund, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.

He is the winner of the 2011 Apex Art Franchise Award, a 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellow in Art, a 2009 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow, a 2008-2009 Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellow, and a recipient of the 2009 Artadia Award. His first book May the Finest in the World Always Accompany You! will be published in 2011. He is invited to be the Artist-in-Residence at Amherst College in Spring 2012.

Kickstarter page to donate to the Sudden Flowers project.

STEP UP 2010 is made possible with the generous support of Real Art Ways Members, the National Endowment for the Arts, Sandy and Howard Fromson, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, the Nimoy Foundation, the National Performance Network's Visual Artists Network, Lincoln Financial Group, Travelers and Greater Hartford Arts Council's United Arts Campaign.