MAHABA weaves futuristic iconography with historical African aesthetics and contemporary research to propose a potential roadmap for society’s next steps. By blending visual arts with community research, the project encourages viewers to investigate their personal histories to envision collectivist models of moving forward.

Translating as “love” in Swahili, MAHABA emerges out of Gebrehiwot’s creative practice of working with Black aesthetics to investigate the social dynamics of community groups and populations to consider the situations that bring us together and strengthen our spirits. Gebrehiwot engages in a multi-modal research process that grounds ideating conversations with collaborating artists and community members in shared themes and questions. These conversations are then manifested in visual languages to create a speculative universe that Gebrehiwot then stages and photographs. Textile artists, craftspeople, movement directors, hairstylists and makeup artists all offer contributions that reflect diverse African and Black Diasporic aesthetics. The result is the creation of an unplaceable being of a Black future, birthed through conversations about society, the collective, survival and affect.

Inspired by practices and schools of thought such as Afro-Futurism, Sadiyah Hartman’s critical fabulation, and Camille Turner’s Otherworld, Gebrehiwot grounds the fictional universe of MAHABA in a premise of cyclical spiralling time. As bodies and matters are at once decaying and being birthed, time folds back upon itself to make the future perceptible from the present. The pleats of this folding back are the mechanism through which past and present generations are able to commune and transfer knowledge. By weaving traditional African practices alongside modern materials in unexpected ways, Gebrehiwot obscures any perception of a clear time period, suggesting instead that these figures live in a different timeline, or even outside of the concept of time entirely. 

In its dissemination, MAHABA aims to strengthen connectivity in Afro-diasporic communities that have had their trajectory interrupted or ruptured by colonialism and forced migration. By guiding viewers through exercises of world-building that fuse imagined societies with the historical archive, MAHABA encourages the development of future visioning beyond this project. How might photography and digital media collage together ideas of where we came from with ideas of where we’re going? What do the authors of our future look like and how will they get us there?