Organised by the Institute for Museums, Heritage and Society (IMHS) as part of Black History Month.

Konjit Seyoum is an Ethiopian artist, curator and interpreter whose work explores gender, identity, displacement, memory and loss. At the heart of her artistic work is the traditional Ethiopian practice of hand-spinning raw cotton, through which she creates not only a line through time and space, but also narratives and connections across generations. Her latest project, titled The Dress is Mine, reflects on the looted dress of the Ethiopian Queen Tirunesh, held captive for a century and a half in a drawer at the Victoria and Albert Museum, wrapped in acid-free paper and serial-numbered 399-1869.

Konjit is the founder of Asni Gallery in Addis Ababa, which she ran from 1996 until 2018 as an independent space dedicated to contemporary Ethiopian art. She was Smithsonian Art Ambassador at the 2026 Venice Biennale and was a panellist at the Ethiopian Pavilion in 2024. In 2022, she served on the International Jury of the 14th Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. Konjit is a member of Independent Curators International. She holds an MFA in Creative Practice from Plymouth University, UK, and is a graduate of the University of Trieste’s School of Interpretation and Translation. She has worked as a freelance interpreter for more than two decades for UNECA, the African Union, the Italian Embassy in Ethiopia and other international institutions.

This lecture will be held at 4.00pm in School III.

All welcome