GENET (working title)
- Sosena Solomon
- Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
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Independent Creative Production Grant
Sosena Solomon is an African-born, American-raised woman artist working in Philadelphia at the intersection of cultural preservation, documentary storytelling, and contemporary art. Using auto-ethnographic methods, she interrogates and keeps the stories of her family and her community as part of a larger narrative of global history, memory and experience. (Image of Genet)
Sosena Solomon will pay tribute to her long-lost sister Genet through a film-based Installation project in which she captures Genet’s truly remarkable life. Living with HIV is still deeply misunderstood and stigmatized in the Ethiopian diaspora and even within her family. This work attempts to unsettle the culture of shame and stigma which isolates people from their families and creates cycles of harm and mistrust. By centering Genet as the feature of this work, Solomon is connecting her sister to a genealogy of women she has begun to trace within her work. In the end, this project will culminate in a multi-channel, three-dimensional installation piece which expands upon Solomon’s body of work documenting the extraordinary lives of women in her family and their defiance in the face of gendered taboos.