What's on your mind - An exhibition by Studio 11
Reading time: 2 minutes
Bethel Getu
When you first encounter Bethel’s work, it does not feel like it is speaking to you. It feels like it is listening. The paintings at studio 11 begin with questions asked in the middle of real conversations, where people forget to filter themselves and then immediately try to recover what they said. Bethel pays attention to what happens in that split second. The pause before an answer. The way someone changes direction mid-thought. The things that almost get said, then disappear. Those moments become the starting point of the work.
Bethel’s process is built through exchange. She asks questions and listens more than she directs. What people say enters the work indirectly, filtered through repetition and recollection. Over time, those responses stop belonging to individual voices. They begin to overlap. Because it becomes difficult to separate what is truly personal from what has been absorbed. Other people’s fears, expectations, and desires do not stay outside you. They accumulate until they start to feel internal. The paintings reflect that condition back without trying to clean it up or explain it.
Inside the paintings, thoughts move in fragments. Fear appears alongside desire. Memory sits next to doubt. Faith and intimacy surface without settling into clear meaning. Nothing is presented as resolved. Instead, the work holds the instability of thinking itself, the way the mind rarely stays in one place long enough to be certain of anything.
There is no clear message waiting at the end. The work resists that kind of closure. Instead, it slows everything down enough for recognition to happen. You stand in front of it and realize how familiar certain thoughts feel, even when you cannot remember where you first encountered them.
By the time you leave, the question is no longer abstract. It stays with you, unsettled, slightly too close. What are you actually thinking about?
You can find more information about the current exhibition and the artworks on display on the studio 11 website.
Connections - An exhibition by Studio 11
