I am an artist, educator, and independent curator. Under the name Atelier LK’, I develop an itinerant laboratory for ideation, collaboration, and poetic unfoldings — a nomadic incubator shaped by three decades of cross-pollination between media, disciplines, narratives, and geographies: Addis Ababa, Dubai, London, Rabat, and Crans-Montana.
Since the late 1990s, I have been building a protean body of work spanning painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, printmaking, performance, and curating. Trained at the University of Rennes and mentored by art critic Denys Zacharopoulos, I completed my Master’s degree before moving to Addis Ababa in 1999 for what became a sixteen-year immersion: teaching art history at the School of Fine Arts and Design, founding and directing three contemporary art galleries, and collaborating closely with artists, architects, performers, and musicians from the Ethiopian scene.
Alongside my studio practice, I have been entrusted with the artistic direction of large-scale cultural proposals for international institutions such as UNESCO, the Goethe-Institut, BOZAR (Brussels), the British Council, the African Union, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which awarded me the AFAA Prize in recognition of the singular and innovative nature of my projects and artistic commitment.
In 2016, I relocated to Dubai, temporarily stepping back from gallery and curatorial activities to focus more fully on my own work — through residencies and projects opening new territories and audiences: an off-programme presentation around Art Dubai, a residency in Liège, and a commission from the MAK in Vienna. After a year in London, I established my studio in 2019 in my native Loire Valley, marking a decisive turn toward painting and a sequence of solo exhibitions.
My approach — deliberately “variable geometry” — is nourished by an ongoing dialogue with poetry, philosophy, theology, literature, and the sciences. Each exhibition activates multiple dimensions and resists confinement within a single formal language, moving between media and modes of writing.
In 2022, I was appointed to structure an arts and design education programme in Rabat, Morocco, where I worked for two years. Now based in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, I continue to develop new propositions under the aegis of Atelier LK’ — a living platform, an experimental and relational studio shaped by new forms, new light, and the perpetual necessity of reinventing my trajectory.
As an artist, teacher, and independent curator, I run Atelier LK’, a traveling laboratory for ideation and poetic expressions. My work spans painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, performance, and curation, seeking to create spaces for dialogue between images, forms, and ideas.
Since the late 1990s, my journey has taken me from Addis Ababa—where I lived and worked for sixteen years at the heart of the Ethiopian art scene—to Dubai, London, and then Rabat, through projects, residencies, exhibitions, and collaborations with institutions such as UNESCO, the Goethe-Institut, BOZAR, and the British Council.
Fed by poetry, philosophy, theology, and the sciences, my practice rejects confinement to a single medium and favors movement between disciplines, narratives, and territories.
Now based in Crans-Montana, in the Swiss Alps, I pursue this work as one pursues a journey: by shifting forms, reworking narratives, and searching—stubbornly—for new ways to inhabit the world through an iconography in motion.
ATELIER LK’ was supported by :
