June 15, 2026 - June 21, 2026
Fiker Solomon: Between Skin and Soil
Booth 22
Fiker Solomon (b. 1995 in Addis Ababa) is an Ethiopian artist, currently based in Kampala, Uganda. Her practice emerges through embodied experience and a profound sensitivity to her environment. Rooted in movement, immersion in nature, close attention to bodily sensation, and tactile engagement with her materials, her work unfolds as an intuitive dialogue between the body and what surrounds it.
Throughout her work, Solomon’s personal, autobiographical experiences take up center stage, yet expand into an entry point toward broader social and cultural reflections.
She creates tapestries and large-scale immersive installation using materials like yarns, sisal, palm leaves, raffia, natural bathing sponges (ekyangwe in Luganda) jute sacks, among others. Each material is chosen for its texture and symbolic resonance. Among these, the jute sack holds a central place. In Ethiopia, jute, commonly used for packaging coffee, one of the country’s most important export crops, is often treated as something purely functional and easily discarded. In her work, the jute sack becomes a symbol of people or communities whose essential contributions are often overlooked. By reclaiming and elevating this humble material, she highlights its strength and complexity, offering a metaphor for renewal and transformation in the material as well as natural and social environments.
This presentation comprises of two consecutive bodies of work. The earlier work from 2025 reflects Solomon’s personal and artistic transformation after moving from Addis Ababa to Kampala, where living independently opened space for introspection and experimentation. Here, she explores themes of growth, healing, memory, and renewal, using making as a way to process change and reimagine belonging. Her practice invites viewers to experience place through emotion, sensation, and lived experience rather than through fixed definitions or geography alone.
Her subsequent body of work created in 2026 begins with a simple but precise gesture: she moves and observes how her clothing responds. Through photography and video, she captures these fleeting forms created as fabric folds, stretches, and shifts around the body. These moments often unnoticed become the foundation of this new body of work.
Rather than focusing on the body itself, she is interested in what the body produces through clothing. The shapes that appear become expressions of identity, showing how we construct and communicate ourselves through what we wear. She explores how clothing allows us to express who we are, who we want to be, what we are expected to be, and how we are seen by others.
Fiker holds a BFA in Textile Design from Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University, and specialized in sculpture at Teferi Mekonnen College. She held her debut solo exhibition ‘From Addis to Kampala: A Sensory Geography’ at Afriart Gallery, Uganda in 2025. Her work has been presented internationally, including seminal group exhibitions such as ‘Améfrica: Diasporic Connections in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection’ at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain (2026), ‘Woven Sanctuaries’ at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (2024), and ‘African Landscapes – Past and Present’ at Strauss & Co, Cape Town (2024). She also participated in major art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, Liste Art Fair Basel, Art X Lagos, Taipei Dangdai, FNB Joburg Art Fair, and ZonaMaco.