Ethiopia has experienced a transformative shift in youth culture, with skateboarding emerging as a significant medium for personal and collective expression. In 2013, the establishment of Ethiopia Skate marked the inception of the countryís first organized skateboarding community, followed by the opening of Addis Skate Park in 2016, the nationís first and only free-of-charge public skate park. These milestones, while noteworthy, represent the beginning of a broader movement that sees skateboarding not merely as a sport but as a cultural tool for empowerment.
Despite the growing popularity of skateboarding, women faced significant barriers to participation. In response to bullying and harassment, two female skaters founded Ethiopian Girl Skaters in 2020, a collective aimed at creating safe spaces for girls and women to engage in skateboarding. Their mission was clear: ìFree skateboarding lessons for girls.î Since its inception, the collective has grown to 150 members, predominantly aged 10ñ25, becoming a symbol of resistance, solidarity, and empowerment. Every Saturday morning, Addis Skate Park is reserved exclusively for girls to learn, practice, and build a sense of sisterhood, an act of liberation in a society that often seeks to limit womenís agency. The Ethiopian Girl Skaters collective exemplifies radical space-making by redefining freedom through skateboarding. They craft alternative narratives and provide young women with opportunities to reclaim their bodies, identities, and voices. The collective serves not only as a space for play but also as a significant social movement, a transformative act of unlearning and liberation.
Hanna Leka, the girls, 2024, Photography, 11” × 14”
Skate, Create, Liberate brings together five women artists working across photography, painting, collage, audio, and documentary. Presented in Addis Ababa, the exhibition explores how girlhood, creativity, resistance, and play intersect in the making of spaces where women and girls can see and affirm themselves. The curatorial vision is rooted in the observation that girls in Ethiopia, like elsewhere, are not waiting for permission to exist, create, or move freely. They are claiming space, shaping it, and remaking it in their own image. The exhibition celebrates this act of self-definition as a powerful form of expression, whether it takes place on a skateboard, on canvas, or through ritual. Liberation is not a singular gesture but a spectrum of practices, visible, relational, introspective, layered, and ceremonial. Through intimate portraits, textured collages, immersive sound experiences, and documentation of skater girls in action, the exhibition demonstrates that radical space-making is as much about care, attention, and connection as it is about audacity and movement.
Hanna Leka, Skating with Netela, 2024, Photography , 11” × 14”
Hanna Leka’s photography of the Ethiopian Girl Skaters collective provides the exhibitionís energetic pulse. Shot in natural light and without staging, her images capture immediacy, boards clattering on concrete, braids flying mid-jump, and the intensity of balance and fall. The photographs are raw and unpolished, mirroring the vitality of the skaters themselves. They depict young women taking over streets, ramps, and empty lots, rewriting the city as their playground. Rebellion looks like joy, resistance feels like laughter, and radical politics emerge through play. Alongside her photographs, zines made by the Ethiopian Girl Skaters are included. These collective works, assembled from archival images, sketches, and manifestos, act as both archive and declaration, amplifying the voices of girls who insist on their right to movement, visibility, and self-definition.
Medina Mohammed, Nejuma’s house, Photography, 5” × 7”
Medina Mohammed’s photographs recall the intimacy of a family album, capturing friendship, care, and everyday life. Rather than a conventional display, her installation reimagines the work as a memory wall, evoking the feeling of entering a private home. The arrangement draws on vernacular and devotional aesthetics, allowing the photographs to exist as a layered, deeply felt constellation. Shrine-like details are woven into the presentation, inviting viewers into a space that blurs public exhibition and private ritual. The resulting atmosphere honors memory and care, affirming everyday life as a site of resistance and liberation.
Mulu Legesse, Balancing, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 45.3” × 54.7”
Mulu Legesse’s work emphasizes inner resistance over physical rebellion. While skateboarding represents public assertion, Muluís layered collage of sketches and torn fragments reflects the nonlinear, cyclical, and intimate process of becoming. Her large-scale acrylic works capture the search for balance, peace, and power, rendering interiority a radical site of its own. By insisting on wholeness and the coexistence of motherhood and artistry, Mulu expands liberation from public assertion to personal completeness.
Tsion Haileselassie, Reflection of oneself, 2021, photography, 11” × 14”
Tsion Haileselassie’s photographic practice introduces a quiet yet potent presence. Her portraits assert themselves through stillness, attention, and the deliberate act of being seen. Each image studies light and shadow, focusing on a face, body, or gaze. Through stillness, the work reclaims presence and invites viewers to witness vulnerability as strength, highlighting the quiet radicalism of attentiveness, reflection, and self-recognition.
Iri Di’s Reclamation Chamber is an immersive sensory experience existing at the intersection of voice, vibration, and ritual. Participants enter a dark, cocoon-like booth where original vocal compositions guide them through a soundscape designed to reconnect them with themselves. Starting with an intention card and ending with a reflection card, participants engage in private, immersive interaction that emphasizes presence, vulnerability, and self-connection. The chamber transforms the exhibition from visual display into inward reflection on presence, memory, and reclamation.
Medina Mohammed, shirube, Photography, 5” × 7”
The exhibition creates a dialogue between diverse practices, allowing each work to illuminate the others while guiding visitors from the public to the deeply personal. It begins with visible, collective expression of liberation, gradually drawing viewers inward to reveal the hidden labor of becoming. At the entrance, Hanna Lekaís photographs, skateboards, and zines celebrate public, radical joy. Opposite Hanna, Medina Mohammedís memory wall anchors liberation in acts of care, ritual, and community. Moving deeper, visitors encounter private struggles of becoming: Mulu Legesseís monumental collages reflect negotiation, wholeness, and creative labor, while Tsion Haileselassieís intimate portraits offer quiet pauses, revealing vulnerability and the nuanced terrain of womanhood. Finally, visitors enter Iri Diís sound cocoon, engaging with sonic vibrations and guided ritual to reconnect with themselves. This sequencing mirrors lived experience and acts as an archaeological descent, from visible surface, through communal memory and personal identity, into interior psyche, and concluding in ritualized reflection.
Hanna Leka, Semhal, 2024, Photography, 11” x 14
The exhibition asserts Ethiopian womenís presence in spaces where they have often been marginalized or erased, from the skate park to the gallery, while contributing to broader feminist dialogues. Liberation here spans public and private spheres, collective and individual moments, and outer expression and inner transformation. Skate, Create, Liberate is a love letter to girlhood, womanhood, and the radical act of claiming space. It affirms that girls seeing each other, witnessing bravery, creativity, and brilliance, is itself transformative. Liberation manifests in multiple forms: public and playful in Hanna Leka, relational in Medina Mohammed, introspective in Tsion Haileselassie, layered in Mulu Legesse, and ritualized in Iri Di. The exhibition highlights unseen labor, private struggles, and public acts that together create radical space, reminding us that to create is to resist, to play is to protest, and to hold one another is to transform the world. Beyond display, the exhibition is a gathering for celebration, cross-pollination, and mutual recognition: we are here, we see each other, and together we are building the future.
