Escaping eden
Alexandra mitiku

At some point, you’ve imagined a better place. Maybe it was another country. Maybe it was a future version of yourself that feels resolved, stable, whole. You tell yourself, when I get there, it will make sense. That imagined place is your Eden. Escaping Eden sits inside that desire.

Alexandra Mitiku, a Korean-Ethiopian artist, builds her work from clay, indigo, limestone, burnt wood, and fragments of her own writing.

These materials come from Korea and Ethiopia, carrying soil, distance, extraction, and memory within them. The surfaces feel elemental, almost skin-like, as if landscape and body are folding into one another. Nothing feels decorative. Everything feels handled, pressed, altered over time. You sense movement in the making, as though each piece has passed through departure and return before settling on the wall.

The idea of Eden runs quietly through it all, not as a literal garden but as the promise that somewhere else will be better. Alexandra draws from the Genesis story of being formed from earth, and from visual languages rooted in Ethiopian Coptic traditions and ancient Korean art. Her Bird People seem suspended in between states, shaped by migration, inheritance, and the pressure to become something more refined than where they began.

They carry the tension of “no longer” and “not yet” without resolving it. As you move through the exhibition, the work feels less like a statement and more like a mirror. You start to notice how often your own life has been organized around a future that hasn’t arrived yet. And the thought lingers, uncomfortable but clear: if every Eden eventually disappoints you, maybe the pattern isn’t the place. Maybe it’s the story you keep telling yourself about what will finally be enough.