© Ezra Wube

Ezra Wube was born in 1980 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and moved to the United States at the age of 18. He received his BFA in Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (2004), and his MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY (2009). His work encompasses video, installation, drawing, painting and performance. In 2003, he was awarded the Massachusetts Annual Black Achievement Award. He has said of this work: ‘Gela 2 defies singular categorization. Viewers witness a journey through the merging of past and present’.

In 2014 Togolese-French curator and producer Kisito Assangni toured Still Fighting Ignorance and Intellectual Perfidy: Video Art from Africa, a multi-national exhibition and a platform for critical thinking, researching and presenting African video art, to a number of international venues including Ben Uri. The exhibition presented a selection of works by 21 contemporary African video artists, including Wube’s Gela 2 (2010). In his catalogue introduction Assangni concluded that ‘the project tells Africa’s story by African new media artists as seen through the lens of the relation between tradition and modernity’.