GABRIEL EMBEHA
Descartes Demon, Mixed Media, 2020 © Gabriel Embeha
BIOGRAPHY
Through a continual, mixed media interweaving of acrylic, graphite, digital imagery, performance, film, and writing Gabriel Embeha engages a diverse range of persons, places, and things involved in different forms of disability and violence. His process involves an ongoing series of interrelated sacrificial acts and quasi-ethnographic confrontations with scientific representation, the state, conscience, and futility. He lives and works in Berlin.
He has worked closely with persons suffering from illness in various neuroscience clinics and labs, as well as hospitals and nursing homes. He has a PhD in cultural (medical) anthropology, working in West Africa, Miami, New York City, Japan, and Berlin. As an anthropologist, Embeha is an outsider. His work has been much more artistic, self-sacrificial, scientific, and avant-garde than academic anthropology departments have been set to tolerate. He also has an extensive interest in medical practice, is currently licensed as a nurse in the US, and teaches nursing in Berlin.
With the state, terror, and disability as critical themes, his work requires critically engaging subjects such as post-traumatic stress, delirium, and dementia. Some of his experimental artwork/anthropology amounts to the development of a kind of cultural vaccination series that does not to seek to prevent or postpone various disease processes, but rather helps the suffering of all those involved with them.
This work involves hands-on and existential revealings of different, vexing, and disturbing features of the human life, including failing bodies, suffering and secrecy its later stages and too-often-induced performances of powerlessness. My work often yields unconventional and positive variations on the meaning of the human life that our very livelihoods, identities and even art compel us to ignore.