Escaping Eden - An exhibition by Studio 11

Alexandra Mitiku

Alexandra, a Korean-Ethiopian artist, works with clay, indigo, limestone, burnt wood, and fragments of writing pulled from her own journals and reflections. The materials come from both Korea and Ethiopia, carrying traces of geography and movement inside them. Nothing in the work feels accidental. The surfaces look worn, layered, almost weathered by time. Some pieces feel like fragments unearthed from the ground rather than newly made objects.

You can sense the physicality of the process immediately. The works hold evidence of pressure and handling. They feel shaped through repetition, as though each piece has moved through cycles of breaking down and rebuilding before arriving in the gallery.

The exhibition in studio 11 takes its title from the idea of Eden, not as a biblical destination alone, but as a condition people keep chasing. The belief that somewhere else will finally make life coherent. That another country, another relationship, another version of the self will resolve the discomfort of the present.

Alexandra approaches that idea through both personal memory and inherited visual language. References to Ethiopian Coptic traditions sit beside forms drawn from ancient Korean art histories. Her Bird People appear throughout the exhibition, figures suspended between human and symbolic forms. They do not seem fully grounded anywhere. Instead, they exist in transition, carrying migration, longing, inheritance, and uncertainty within them.

As viewers moved through the exhibition, many found themselves projecting their own desires onto the work. Conversations shifted quickly from the objects themselves to personal questions about ambition, escape, and disappointment. The work seemed to mirror back a familiar pattern, the constant organizing of life around a future point where everything will finally make sense.

The exhibition suggests that the problem may not be the places we leave or the places we pursue. It may be the belief that fulfillment permanently exists somewhere outside the present version of ourselves. Every imagined Eden carries expectation. Eventually reality enters, and the fantasy fractures.

By the end of the exhibition, what stayed with many people was not a single image or material, but a feeling. The recognition that longing itself can become a habit. That people often spend years chasing futures they cannot fully define. And that sometimes the hardest thing is accepting that no place, no matter how distant or imagined, can completely resolve what we carry with us.

You can find more information about the current exhibition and the artworks on display on the studio 11 website.