Join us for a Reception & Live Performance with artist Helina Metaferia, featuring musical guest Zena Carlota.

‍MoAD Emerging Artists presents Helina Metaferia: Home | Free

Home | Free addresses a diasporic longing for a physical and psychic home in a time of increased voluntary and involuntary mass migration of black bodies. Through an interdisciplinary practice of performance, video, installation, photography, objects, and mark-making, artist Helina Metaferia presents the complexity, transformation, and rebellion that come with migration, immigration, and gentrification. Home | Free explores the use of home-building materials as art objects and the visual language of maps, lines, text, and movement — all tools to help the body navigate the world.

Artist Helina Metaferia will perform with musical guest Zena Carlota for a collaboration of live art that infuses sound, movement, and installation. The performance will highlight notions of the body, migration, and identity while considering MoAD's architectural space. Through experimental actions, Metaferia will activate the art objects in her exhibition while engaging with its critical context.

‍Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist, working in the areas of performance, video, installation, photography, sculpture, and mark-making. Her work investigates the role of the body as both subject and object in art, and transnational identity, diaspora, and gender in the context of her Ethiopian-American heritage. Metaferia completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

She has exhibited solo and group shows at venues such as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, MA), Museum of Modern Art (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), Galeria Labirynt (Lublin, Poland), Grace Exhibition Space (Brooklyn, NY), International Visions Gallery (Washington, DC), and Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago, IL).

Metaferia is also the recipient of the Boit Award, Montague Travel Grant, and Boston Arts Commission Public Art Grant. Her artist residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. She is currently a 2015-2017 AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow at San Francisco Art Institute, where she teaches performance and new genres in the graduate and undergraduate departments.

‍Zena Carlota is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, visual and theater artist whose work navigates the space between dreams, ancestry and memory through sound and imagery. Her practice as an artist is to weave the tenuous boundaries of matter and spirit into form through storytelling, puppetry, mask-making and live sonic ceremonies inspired by the Jaliyaa tradition of West Africa.

The past ten years of studying the Kora, a 21-string West African bridge harp that originates from the Malian Empire during the 13th century, enabled Zena to live and travel in the US, West Africa and Europe, learning both ritual and experimental forms of indigenous string music and storytelling with masters from The Gambia, and Guineau; most recently completing an intensive training in Paris with Grammy award winner, and Kora virtuoso, Toumani Diabate of Mali.

‍This exhibition was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant.

‍This program is presented in conjunction with Third Thursdays in Yerba Buena