Nahom Teklehaimanot’s exhibition Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Scar—Who Put You Where You Are? opened at Circle Gallery on Wednesday night. This is Circle’s first solo exhibition for Teklehaimanot, who relocated to Nairobi last year. He is an Eritrean visual artist whose work explores migration, memory, displacement, and the fragile architecture of belonging.
The work appears as large scale collages, bringing together disparate imagery, some clearly related to Eritrean tradition, including historical imagery of traditionally garbed Eritrean people, while other facets more contemporary: a bathtub, picasso-like figurations, a boxing ring in which we only see the legs and torsos of the combatants.
The Universe Demands a Fight, 2026
The work feels deeply layered, in meaning as well as the obvious layers of the “collaging”. The multiple images in each piece invite the viewer to spend time with them and make an effort to interpret their meanings. Only by peering carefully and closely at the works, will the viewer realize that what appear to be blown up photo transfers, torn and collaged onto a mixed media canvas are in fact intricately handpainted and airbrushed images.
The intricate handwork enhances the depth of the works. The illusion of collage, created by the much more laborious techniques of painting and hyper-refined airbrushing feels somehow subversive. Like a trick. A true trompe l’oeil, laced with meaning. From the obviously painterly marks to airbrushed imagery so realistic as to look like photo transfers, Teklehaimanot creates layered, atmospheric compositions that navigate the emotional terrain between homeland and exile.
Detail Soft Construction, 2026
Raised between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Teklehaimanot’s practice is deeply informed by lived experiences of movement and rupture. By fusing and overlapping figures, landscapes, and fragments of archival imagery, His paintings evoke the way memory dissolves and reconstructs itself over time. Through softness, erasure, and subtle tonal shifts, the artist examines how identity is shaped by absence as much as presence.
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. 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 diffuseness of the airbrushed gradients echo the fading of memory. The skillfully painted “tears” simulate historical ruptures and state violence, and the effect those have on the trauma informed psyche of those experiencing it.
No Love Without Freedom, 2026
The title of this exhibition, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Scar—Who Put You Where You Are?, is important to the artist. It is a deliberate, haunting subversion of a familiar childhood lullaby whereby he strips away the innocence of the nursery rhyme by replacing the word ‘star’ with ‘scar’. A scar, in Teklehaimanot’s visual lexicon, is a living, breathing piece of historical evidence permanently written onto the human canvas. It is the skin acting as an archive and 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 is refusing to let the viewer settle into passive grief or detached sympathy, making the viewing confrontational.
Framing the exhibition with this title, the artist intends to transform the 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.
