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An Interview with Bekele Mekonnen

As they delight, Bekele Mekonnen’s sculptures provoke critical reflection. Mekonnen’s work stands out immediately for its conceptual facture, as it tropes on and deforms found objects whose everyday material and figurative significance resonate deeply in Ethiopia: mortars, pestles, baking plates, bullets, and syringes—to name but a handful. Perhaps the most evocative among his repertoire of vernacular objects is the plow. Though simple, it enables Mekonnen to cast widely an intricate conceptual net. The life of the plow spans from Ethiopia’s ancient past to its contemporary, and it remains among the essential instruments for the mass cultivation of land. Indeed, its longevity and essential utilitarian value afford the plow, and the enterprise for which it stands, great metaphoric purchase. “No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God,” states the Gospel according to Luke, or “Land to the Tiller!” avows the most popular slogan of the Ethiopian Revolution. And yet, Mekonnen, with his hand to the plow, reflects back, forward; curls inward the plow’s iron point, blunting its figurative advantage, rendering dull its stock metaphoric utility. What might such intervention signify? It questions, for one, the plow’s phallic import, its easy availability to symbolize gendered labor—male labor—as the locus of and vehicle to