Betelhem Makonnen

Big Medium is pleased to present the third annual Tito's Prize exhibition featuring winner Betelhem Makonnen. The solo exhibition opened with a special reception on Friday, March 6, 2020 with a very short run due to the pandemic. The show resumed in the fall with protocols that allowed for appointment only visits.

Big Medium partnered with Tito's Handmade Vodka to create the $15,000 award; intended to help grow the recipient’s artistic career and support their life in Austin.

Makonnen was unanimously selected by a curatorial panel that includes Florencia Bazzano, Assistant Curator, Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art (Austin); Annette Lawrence, Artist, and Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas (Denton); and Rigoberto Luna, Director and Curator at Presa House Gallery (San Antonio).

Rock Standard Time (RST) is an invitation to res(e)t our current climate of temporal anxiety. Feeling exiled from time, rather than being in and of it, it seems everyone is continually chasing after it and never catching up. How can we have time outside of imposed standards and within our best interests? Can we rush, if we must, but slowly? Works in photography, video, text and installation made through, with, and just in time ask us to shift our perspective and consider multiple scales and registers for time accounting.

Born from continuing conversations, correspondence and collaborations, the exhibition is a meditative resistance to the internalized ticks and tocks that assert we have no time to respond to ourselves, to each other, nor our world. Time in all its conjugation and tenses is inseparable from the human experience – we are time and time is on our side, yes it is.

Betelhem Makonnen researches questions on perception, presence, and place within a trans-temporal and trans-locative topology that operates on the relational dynamics of diasporic consciousness. In addition to her artistic practice, she is on the curatorial team of Fusebox Festival and co-editor of the online arts periodical Written & Spoken. She is also a founding member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project.

betelhemmakonnen.com