Elias Sime “Twisted & Hidden”

James Cohan Gallery

This event has ended.

Twisted & Hidden, an exhibition of new work by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime opens at James Cohan’s Chelsea location. This second solo exhibition at the gallery features large-scale, wall-mounted artworks constructed from a grid-like arrangement of panels encrusted with electronic parts.

Elias Sime’s work is a meditation on connectivity and transformation. His unorthodox materials include reclaimed cell phone bodies, Soviet-era transistors, computer motherboards, brightly colored electrical wires, sections of plastic keyboards with other e-waste that has been discarded and sent to trash heaps across the African continent. This technological flotsam eventually washes up in the open-air markets of Addis Ababa, where Sime repurposes it into artworks. The works on view are part of an ongoing series entitled “Tightrope,” which refers to the contemporary balancing act between technology and tradition, humanity and the environment.

Elias Sime is a prominent name internationally. With the full cooperation of curator and anthropologist Meskerem Assegued, Sime founded and designed the Zoma Contemporary Art Center in Addis Ababa, an international art center described by the New York Times in 2014 as “a voluptuous dream, a swirl of ancient technique and ecstatic imagination.”