Art Restores Migrants Who Become Numbers

May 2 , 2026. By Blen Hailu ( Blen Hailu (blenmahi12@gmail.com) studied marketing, management and law. She works in communications and digital content creation, with a focus on human rights, equity and youth engagement.  )

From the coast of Libya to the shores of Djibouti, the Mediterranean remains a perilous corridor. Ashenafi Mestika’s work insists that every statistic once belonged to a person with a name and a story interrupted. He uses "entangled" imagery, such as distorted human figures and fragmented bodies moving through canvases. The distortion acts as a stand-in for the disappeared, whose identities have been eroded by distance, bureaucracy, and the physical strain of the crossing. The work seeks to restore form to the broken, providing a visual presence to those whose bodies were never recovered and whose names were absorbed into numbers, Writes Blen Hailu (blenmahi12@gmail.com) studied marketing, management and law. She works in communications and digital content creation, with a focus on human rights, equity and youth engagement.

Ashenafi Mestika is an artist whose training, observations, and lived experience shape work that is technically assured and emotionally restrained.

Presenting his fifth solo exhibition consisting of 19 paintings, he is showing his work at the Addis Cinema Complex, a newly inaugurated cultural space off Ras Abebe Aregay St., behind Nib Bank's headquarters in Sengatera neighbourhood. The modern, multi-story facility provides a fitting setting for an exhibition that joins private memory to collective experience. Running from early April to early May, the exhibition marks another stage in his practice.

Titled “Entangled Stories,” the Exhibition depicts migration that appears not as movement alone, but as a human story of dreams, sacrifice, risk, and, too often, silence.

Take the incident last month, off the coast of eastern Libya, where a boat described as "unsafe and dilapidated" went down, taking with it the lives of dozens of migrants, among them Ethiopians. Only weeks before, near Obock in Djibouti, another vessel carrying hundreds, mostly Ethiopian citizens, capsized. Several were confirmed dead, and many others were reported missing.

The sea became less a passage than a register, recording lives already driven across deserts, borders, and fate.

The Mediterranean route, one of the world’s most perilous migration corridors, had already registered a devastating number of deaths and disappearances early in the year. Different sources have consistently reported that thousands of migrants have died or vanished in recent years. The figures do not merely mark isolated accidents. They expose a crisis that has become steady, familiar, and, for many families, unbearably intimate.

Migration is not new to Africa, and Ethiopia has long known its sorrowful version. For years, young people have left in search of dignity, work, safety, and a life large enough to support those waiting behind. Their departures often carry a mixture of hope and dread. Families bless them, advise them, and imagine the remittances, the return, the house to be built, and the siblings to be educated. Yet the roads they take are rarely generous. They are marked by uncertainty, exploitation, hunger, heat, fear, and, too often, death.

Recent years show the danger. Ethiopia consistently ranks among the top 10 countries of origin for migrants who die on migration routes globally.

The Eastern Route, stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, has become one of the deadliest paths in the world. A combination of various reports compiled that deaths and disappearances along it have sharply increased, over 3,000 since 2020, with Ethiopians forming the overwhelming majority of those affected. Deadly boat capsizes off Yemen, adding to the toll. According to data from UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), over time, the cumulative number of Ethiopian migrants who have died or gone missing during migration exceeded 8,000 over the past six years.

The southern route toward South Africa is no kinder. Migrants there have faced suffocation in containers, abandonment in remote areas, and violence from traffickers and criminal networks. According to IOM figures, no fewer than 100 Ethiopian nationals have died on this route since the turn of the current decade.

Migrants vanish without a trace, their bodies unrecovered, their names eventually absorbed into numbers. Their absence becomes a wound that families keep carrying because there is no grave, no final word, and no proof of an ending.

Against this background of loss, endurance, and unanswered questions, Ashenafi's Exhibition, “Entangled Stories,” takes shape. The Exhibition examines the space between the hope that sends people away and the silence that follows. It is part of a broader storytelling effort developed over the past three years that traces different layers of life, struggle, and human longing.

Ashenafi's work treats migration as personal and collective. The decision to leave is rarely casual, made under pressure, with obligations pressing from home and a possibility glimmering somewhere beyond reach. People leave to provide and protect those they love. But many journeys end not in arrival, but in disappearance.

In “Entangled Stories,” Ashenafi uses entanglement as a visual and emotional language. Hope is tied to loss, while memory shares space with emptiness. The physical strain of crossing borders is joined to the psychological burden of never knowing where the journey will end. His layered images resist easy explanation. The destination, imagined as a place of promise, remains uncertain, while the journey itself becomes the decisive, and sometimes final, chapter.

Distorted human figures move through the paintings as stand-ins for the disappeared. Their fragmented bodies tell a story of people whose identities have been reduced by distance, bureaucracy, and death. Yet the work restores something to them. It gives them form, however broken, and insists that every statistic once belonged to a person with a family, a name, and a story interrupted. Everyday objects carry much of their force.

A paper boat, like those children make during the rainy season, becomes a fragile emblem of journeys across unforgiving water. A worn sandal, common among people travelling through desert landscapes, speaks of survival and vulnerability. The artist later learned that such footwear is often used to protect feet from the burning desert ground, adding realism to the image. These objects pull the paintings back toward lived experience and toward a homesickness that is difficult to name.

I remember hearing such stories as a child, on the radio and in scattered conversations, place names sounding far away and yet strangely near. I did not understand them then. They moved past me as distant tragedies, numbers without faces. But standing before these paintings, I was returned not only to those early memories, but also to the recent incident in Libya, to the images, the loss, and the silence that followed. The figures on the canvas stopped being abstract. They carried the weight of stories I had once half-heard and could no longer ignore.

One painting stands apart for its cultural and emotional charge. It shows a traditional dish, dice, and a “ketab,” a cross containing a small piece of scripture. The image draws on an Ethiopian tradition in which children, after baptism, are blessed through symbolic rituals involving bread or injera placed upon them, a gesture meant to wish them prosperity and protection. Ashenafi’s dice alter the meaning. They mean that, for many migrants, survival becomes a matter of chance. Blessings may accompany departure, but the journey’s outcome often lies beyond anyone’s control.

This tension between intention and reality runs through the exhibition. Migration begins with purpose, with dreams of change and renewal. Families send loved ones away with prayers and expectations. The road then strips away certainty, leaving probability, risk, and sometimes tragedy. The dice become a plain but powerful metaphor for how thin the line can be between survival and loss.

“Entangled Stories” works as a memorial and a mirror. It asks viewers to face the open space left by the missing, to sit with absence, and to recognise the lives hidden behind migration statistics. By turning absence into presence, the exhibition gives emotional weight to unfinished journeys. It asks what it means to seek a better life and never arrive, and how a society remembers people whose stories end without closure.

A graduate of the Alle School of Fine Art & Design at Addis Abeba University, and painting from Entoto Polytechnic College, Ashenafi’s own path into art began unexpectedly. As a child, he loved football, but an injury in his early school years kept him at home. During that period, he spent time with a neighbour who was a painter. What began as imitation became a vocation. He never returned to football, instead finding a lasting attachment to canvas and visual storytelling.

PUBLISHED ON May 02,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1357]