Helina Metaferia’s interdisciplinary practice includes performance, video, mixed media collage, installation, and sculptural assemblage. Her work investigates the relationship between the body and the politics of space, particularly as it relates to notions of identity and citizenship. Through a hybrid of mediums, she mines materials, archives, and artifacts for their suggested histories, and creates new meanings by activating them through embodied gestures. As an Ethiopian-American, Helina’s practice draws upon both African and Western art histories.
Helina Metaferia completed her MFA at Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at Museum of African Diaspora (San Francisco), Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit), Smack Mellon (New York), and Modern Art Museum (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). She is currently a Mellon Fellow / Assistant Professor at Brown University, and lives and works in New York City.
This live online lecture will be embedded here at the time listed above.
Helina Metaferia, Fifth Story, live performance, 2017; Bemis Center for Contemporary Art; photo by Brendan Hoffman
