WE ARE WHAT WE ARE NOT

What is missing tells its own history.

When objects disappear from a museum’s collection, traces remain: catalog entries, inventory numbers, classification systems. They mark what is gone – but do not replace it. What is missing lingers in the archive as a specter.

WE ARE WHAT WE ARE NOT displays no objects from the RJM’s holdings. The exhibition by curator and artist Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen turns the gaze toward what is no longer there – and asks what these absences reveal about the museum, its history, and its structures of power.

His approach is at once analytical and poetic, theoretical and sensory, serious and playful. In response to a missing African headrest, In response to a missing african headrest, Mekonnen has collected dreams – none of which belong to the collection – and made them audible in an immersive installation where the visitors are invited to sleep into these dreams. He has searched the archive for objects that were once edible, and from this research developed a dinner performance and a film. In his mixed-media installations, films, and photographs, theoretical inquiry becomes sensory experience – and the most rigorous response to loss can also be the most unexpected, the most tender, and at times the most joyful.

Visitors are invited to see absence as not as lack – but as a beginning.