Senait & Nahom | ሰናይት :: እና :: ናሆም | The Peacemaker & The Comforter
Makonnen invests in the transhistorical forced migration of black communities across the globe. A movement that is intimately tied to varying forms of violence and brutality. Senait & Nahom’s manifestation consists of sculpture, photography, and performance as the exhibition traces the history of state-sanctioned violence and police brutality towards Black women throughout the world.
Filling the interior of the gallery space with light are a series of columnar towers of varying heights, made up of 50 light boxes, named after Eritreans Senait and her son Nahom, both of whom tragically died in a European detention center. Ethiopian Coptic Crosses are laser-cut into the stacked faces which make up the towers. Each segment of the monument’s light towers are named after 50 individual Black women who have died by the hands of police brutality in the United States or the nefarious Mediterranean Sea—all seeking refuge in alienating lands.
Rooted in ritual, ceremony, remembrance, and memorialization, the light monuments create space to reflect upon and honor such moments of profound loss. Makonnen grapples with the long history of the dehumanization of Black women and their communities through processes which normalize their premature death. This exhibition, in the afterlife of slavery, knowing horrors of a global capitalism built from the limited life and expedient death of Black women harkens to the inquiry of the scholar Christina Sharpe. Senait and Nahom is an homage, a wake, a testament to the fullness of the peacemaker and comforter.