Inside the Kuriftu x Merha Artist Residency with Eyayu Genet, Leykun Girma, and Selamawit Gebretsadik

There is a unique kind of quiet that lives in Entoto Forest. An ancient, forgotten kind that reminds you of its existence the moment you enter. A living, breathing presence that gently engulfs your senses. You can hear the wind blowing through the dry eucalyptus leaves, its scent filling the air, as you watch the slow interplay between shadow and light. There’s a stillness here that feels more like a return to self rather than an escape from the noise of the city.

For one week, artists Eyayu, Leykun, and Selamawit lived and worked inside that stillness at Kuriftu Entoto Resort, inhabiting its glamping sites. The residency offered no spectacle or performance of productivity. Instead, it offered time. And for each artist, it became a material to shape, stretch, and translate onto their canvases.

Inside the MERHA Kuriftu Artist

Residency

Eyayu Genet, Leykun Girma, and

Selamawit Gebretsadik

For Eyayu, the forest was not unfamiliar terrain. Raised in Durbete and later working in Bahir Dar, his life has always been shaped by proximity to land, ritual, and communal rhythm. “I was surrounded by landscapes, cultural objects, spiritual symbols, and communal rhythms that shaped me long before I ever called myself an artist.” He says.

At Entoto, the forest felt like an extension of that lineage, welcoming as if it already knew him. His practice, rooted in indigenous materials such as cow hides and culturally resonant objects, refuses the false divide between tradition and contemporaneity. Even as his exhibitions travel abroad, Eyayu insists that Ethiopian environmental sensibility travels with him, guiding his contrasts, his palettes, and what he describes as the emotional temperature of his work. “Many assume that my use of traditional aesthetics means I am looking backward. In reality, I’ve been using tradition to push forward, to imagine new possibilities for African contemporary art.”

His current work lives in tension: organic versus artificial, communal identity versus urban fragmentation, memory versus modernity. The forest sharpened these questions, allowing him to sit with them without urgency. Walking, observing textures, revisiting objects, becoming part of the work itself. More than anything, the residency reaffirmed his belief in art as service to community, ecology, and continuity. “Legacy isn’t just what hangs on walls,” he says. “It’s what you leave in people.”

For Leykun, Entoto was less a destination than a return.

Born and raised in Addis Ababa, near the wooded area of Kebena, his earliest visual language formed in the tension between forest and city. Of nature existing alongside political complexity, social contradiction, and everyday survival. “This place didn’t just affect my work,” he says. “It shaped how I see.”

At Kuriftu, that childhood geography resurfaced, softened by time but no less potent. His practice, once rooted in realism and semi-realism, has evolved into a more symbolic and philosophical language, informed by his recent MA in art and philology and his exploration of talismanic forms, scripture, and spiritual symbolism.

The human figure remains central in his work, but not as a portrait. Instead, it becomes a site of inquiry as a way to explore existence, endurance, death, and meaning.“The human form is symbolic of a divine underground existence.” He explains In the stillness of Entoto, his process slowed. Reading, revisiting older works, allowing intuition to surface before structure follows. He describes intuition as ignition, discipline as the system that allows it to hold shape.“I stop when the work begins to distort its truth,” he says of knowing when a piece is finished.

In a moment defined by trends and technological acceleration, Leykun remains resistant to speed. “Technology can imitate form,” he says. “But it can’t replace lived experience, emotion, or cultural memory.” The forest echoed this belief, reminding him that meaning is built slowly, layer by layer.

Where Eyayu works with lineage and Leykun with memory, Selamawit works with time. Her practice centers on leaves, using them as a philosophical anchor, and at Kuriftu, surrounded by fallen leaves and quiet growth, the theme became unavoidable. “Whenever I see a fallen leaf, or a new leaf appearing on a houseplant, I try to capture that moment,” she says. “Everything links back to time for me.”

Her work connects women, leaves, and time, tracing the life cycle of a leaf as a metaphor for emotional states, endurance, and transformation. She is less interested in representing an object than in capturing its essence. “I want to fuse timelessness with the state of nature,” she explains. “Not to seek answers but to explore.”

Over the past years, Selamawit’s practice has evolved from figurative work toward a non-figurative, emotional language, where color, sensation, and temporality take precedence over form. Her current work asks not what a leaf looks like, but what it feels like and how that feeling mirrors her own interior landscape. When she feels blocked, she doesn’t force resolution. She begins again, working on background canvases, starting new pieces, allowing movement to generate clarity. However, her work is often misread as political positioning.

“People ask if I’m a feminist or a victim,” she says. “I don’t like being placed into agendas. One leaf can represent many stories. One person’s pain is also my pain.”

For Selamawit, art requires patience, and so does the completion process. “I don’t prescribe a finish line,” she says. “Art needs time to reach its own state.” Legacy is the core of her practice. “I want my work to transcend time,” she says. “To leave something that goes beyond myself.”

The Space That Shapes Us

What unites these three artists is not style, medium, or method, but tempo.

The Merha x Kuriftu Artist residency resists urgency. It does not demand output or performance. Instead, it offers alignment. Mornings shaped by light, evenings shaped by quiet, days measured not by productivity but by remembering to be present, sharing space with the forest.

Within this slowed rhythm, space becomes active. It shapes how the body rests, how the mind listens, and how ideas arrive. Time stretches, and attention sharpens. Creation follows not from pressure, but from attunement. Each artist responds differently, yet all are shaped by the same condition: the permission to exist without acceleration.

Though their practices diverge, Eyayu, Leykun, and Selamawit share an understanding that space is never neutral. The environments we inhabit carry memory, emotion, and history. They influence how we see the world and how we translate it into form.

In the end, the Artist Residency is not about retreating from the world, but about returning to it with greater clarity. With the understanding that who we become and what we create is inseparable from the spaces that shape us.