Nahom Teklehaimanot: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Scar — Who Put You Where You Are?: Circle Art Gallery One

Nahom's work explores migration, memory, displacement, and the fragile architecture of belonging. Working primarily with airbrush and collage, Teklehaimanot creates layered, atmospheric compositions that navigate the emotional terrain between homeland and exile. Raised between Ethiopia and Eritrea, his practice is deeply informed by lived experiences of movement and rupture. His paintings often blur figures, landscapes, and fragments of archival imagery, evoking the way memory dissolves and reconstructs itself over time. Through softness, erasure, and subtle tonal shifts, he examines how identity is shaped by absence as much as presence.

This is Circle’s first solo exhibition for the artist, the title, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Scar—Who Put You Where You Are?, is a deliberate, haunting subversion of a familiar childhood lullaby. By replacing the word ‘star’ with ‘scar’, artist Nahom Teklehaimanot fundamentally strips away the innocence of the nursery rhyme. He forcefully twists a song traditionally used to comfort a sleeping child into an active, urgent investigation of power, structural accountability, and personal trauma. The cosmic, distant wonder of a twinkling star is dragged down to earth, mutating into the raw, physical reality of human suffering.A scar, in Teklehaimanot’s visual lexicon, is not merely a passive mark of a past injury or a closed chapter of history. Instead, it is a living, breathing piece of historical evidence permanently written onto the human canvas. It is the skin acting as an archive, a landscape that remembers what the world tries to erase. By closing the subverted rhyme with a direct, uncompromising question 'Who put you where you are?’, the artist refuses to let the viewer settle into passive grief or detached sympathy. This inquiry shifts the narrative from internal mourning to external confrontation. It transforms the exhibition space into a courtroom of collective memory, pointing a direct, interrogative finger at the unseen geopolitical systems, borders, and regimes responsible for the systematic wounding and displacement of innocent souls. To fully experience this exhibition, viewers are invited to look past the deceptively smooth, dreamlike surfaces of the works and observe the complex, paradoxical mechanics of their creation. While these pieces possess the striking, raw appearance of tactile, torn archival collages, they are entirely constructed from pure paint. Teklehaimanot pulls off a staggering feat of visual deception, utilizing highly sophisticated masking, precise line-work, and hyper-refined airbrush textures to paint the illusion of a collage. This deliberate technical choice serves as the primary metaphorical engine of the show. By meticulously painting these simulated rips, rough edges, and overlapping historical fragments, the artist mirrors the psychological state of survival under pressure: The Soft, Airbrushed Gradients mimic the fading of memory, the passage of time or the ghostly, persistent resilience of the human spirit. The Painted Visual Fractures simulate historical ruptures and state violence, showing how trauma forces a person to reconstruct their identity from shattered pieces. What appears to be a physical tearing of paper is actually a masterful application of pigment, proving that the “scars” on these figures are woven into the very fabric of their being.