Dawit L. Petros

Mahber Shawʼate (Association of Seven) is a suite of photographs, cardboard box sculptures, and wall murals. While the arrangements of the boxes reference minimal and early conceptual art, the boxes themselves, despite their emptiness, carry connotations of travel and migration. This complication of the legacy of these art movements by the movements of people is furthered by the projectʼs conceptual framework. Rather than working within the mathematical, permutational traditions of conceptual art, the project takes language as a model, specifically the Tigrinya alphabet, as used in my birthplace of Eritrea. The letters of the Tigrinya alphabet are transformed by their context; consonant letterforms are modified depending on neighboring vowels. The photographs build on this notion of contingent structure, and in so doing manifest structurally what is generally true of linguistic meaning: that it is always contingent on its context, a truth which is demonstrated by the larger structure of the project.