Awra Tewolde-Berhan
Kol’uso, as though we’re live, 2026

Two CRT televisions, digital video (DV), wires, white masking tape, printed matter, wall interventions, deflated balloon, in-built sound

Kol’uso, as though we’re live is a spatial installation built around two CRT televisions positioned within an imagined football pitch. White floor markings trace boundaries forming a compressed viewing zone viewers may enter, avoid, or hover around.

Both monitors play looped video sequences. One presents Kol’uso (Feed Him) (2008), a clandestine recording of football matches in Asmara Stadium. The footage operates through deflection: the following of the game obscures another, whispered, site in the background, refrained from documentation. The second video observes a peripheral site; a busy laundromat in East Harlem, NYC. The work forms part of a series recorded across launderettes in multiplying cities, where machines continue rotating in de-narrativised states. Across both works, the camera shifts toward empty seating, rusting materials, peripheral grounds and ungoverned edges.

The installation extends an ongoing practice of recording and screening audiovisual materials within launderette sites. These spaces—temporary, semi-private, and infrastructurally dense—inform the work’s tight and conditional spatial logic. The work stages relations between visibility, withholding, and site—where to watch, how to watch, and what must remain just out of reach.

Awra Tewolde-Berhan is a British-Eritrean artist working across moving image, installation, sound, and text. Her research-led, site-responsive practice engages decaying and disciplinary infrastructures to trace how memory, technology, and power persist through material residues. Working through long-term processes of return, she develops projects within already activated environments—particularly launderettes—approaching them as charged social and spatial systems. Across London, New York, and Philadelphia, her work tests forms of poor cinema, dispersing and withholding moving images within de-contextualised, time-bound settings where viewership assembles and disassembles.

Recent work draws on user manual–like structures to stage encounters with bureaucratic systems through humour and absurdity. She holds an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, USA (2024) and has participated in programmes including the Flaherty Seminar, and the Orpheus Institute.