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Billion Tekleab

@billiontekleab

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SAIC Sculpture MFA ‘27
Making stuff btwn Chicago & Houston
@blackartcontemporarychicago
Southern Survey Biennial @projectrowhouses

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Hidmo / Who Will Love Me If We’re All Extinct in ___ Years? 2026

The southern psyche is different. It’s more expansive, like the land. I believe being of the South produces in us a deep capacity to imagine, and so to make up new canon. Thank you PRH for being an incubator of that. And thank you Jessica Hong and the entire team. This was such a gift.

Materials list: kiddie pool, dirt, glitter, pink, hyper-pop vacancy, Black girl Gen Z doom, play, love, urgency

@projectrowhouses on view thru Feb 14, 2027

I love this idea of an interior inside an interior. We can reenter a space and find inside it more space. I locate this interior of Gen Z Black girl doom right in the middle of disaster preparedness. I did some digs around third ward, looking for an essence of Africa. In the house, I ran around frantically, trying to orient toward a solution for collapse. But I also partied, played with mud, and danced a lot. How could I not? I’m just a girl, after all.

Inside is a film, Who Will Love Me If We’re All Extinct in ___ Years? projected into a hole. In it, I create my own version of Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being: an alter ego who is a podcast bro, having a podcast conversation with a friend.

I also record my own doom scrolling habits. I look at my city through my screen. I look at sheraseven. I look at my lonely - symptoms of how infiltrated, distracted, and fragmented our digital spaces have become. How is my digital space making and destroy me, and how does my digital space make or destroy the South? The film tries to capture this dialogue of the digital that shapes how my generation approaches catastrophe. It ends in the pure ecstasy of discovery, I am roaming the Gulf, screaming into waves crashing on rocks and laughing and cartwheeling on Galveston shore with “Purple Rain” chopped and screwed and slowed and throwed in the background.

Hidmo / Who Will Love Me If We’re All Extinct in ___ Years? was built from this specificity, looking at the South as an expanded field that moves from the land, through our psyches and digital space, and back down to the land again. In it, play, discovery, anxiety, and fear are held together in tension.

@projectrowhouses on by @billiontekleab

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2 days ago

Anyway, here is our alter egos: Jamal and Darius.

TFW you n your bestie have to line up your eye liner beards before shooting a video series called, “Who will love me if we’re all extinct in ____ years?” and perform Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being, but instead of a Black man from the 70s, he’s a Gen Z toxic podcast brotha!! Yeah we spent 1 hour talking mess and kinda enjoyed it!

If anyone has seen the film in PRH install, pls it is satire and I - WE - do not hate women we just ❤️ our homeboys more #dontcancelus #yallbesafetho by @billiontekleab

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11 days ago

Untitled (Stereotypical Death 1), 2026.

dur, 30 mins: cleaning a 300 Ib cast porcelain clawfoot tub while singing “This Joy That I Have”.

I am making myself at home in my hidden pleasure of acting out the obscene and absurd desires that Black women brush up against in hard moments (abject erotic).

I rejected the notion that we are still being viewed through the lenses of caricatures that were rendered upon us from captivity. It made me uncomfortable and for a long time I didn’t think I wanted to go there. But now I’m pissed off! And I don’t know what to do with the Mammy complex.

Is it sensible to propose that the Mammy might’ve gotten so labored, so exhausted that she had committed attempts at taking her own life? Why are we offended by her death in this way? To her, she is already dead and gone anyway.

(Black women’s labor makes everyone else a person and makes her their person / social death).

And sometimes, she gets so thirsty because the labor is so ridiculous and so unrelenting, that she drinks the dirty and infected water in an attempt. But God is merciful so she will not be poisoned. Instead, she is cleansed and quenched — from the inside. by @billiontekleab

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a month ago

Meet Billion Tekleab, a Houston-based artist working in written word, sculpture, and sound. Her practice connects the Gulf South to the Horn of Africa, using performance and form to imagine liberation and Black subjectivity across the diaspora.

See what she's built at Southern Survey Biennial III, opening October 3 at Project Row Houses.

📍 2521 Holman Street, Houston
🗓 October 3
⏰ 4-7pm opening + community market

Free admission. Register to save your spot.
Link in our bio. by @billiontekleab

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a month ago

Here is your Black Art! (2026) and 60 inches from the floor! (2026)

First crit of the semester ✅ I’ve been experimenting with less material and I’m super pleased with where that’s taking me so far. Bc it gets to a point it’s not everyday bronze bronze steel steel abeg let’s relax ok #artworld?

Also showed my most cringy work in my (old) portfolio at the critique this past Friday! by @billiontekleab

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a month ago

by @billiontekleab

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3 months ago

by @billiontekleab

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3 months ago

Trimmmm by @billiontekleab

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3 months ago

taken in Milan, Italy by @billiontekleab

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4 months ago

Something in the Eye of the Sahara

Steel, sand, clay, coffee, acid paint
Dim: 121.92 cm x 73.66 cm x 10.16 cm
Chicago, Illinois, 2025-2026

I’ve become really close to the floor lately. My mentor Rick Lowe (@rickloweofficial) told me to “look down more often”. And then it kind of became a meditation for me like maybe if I start freaking out about how little time we have left, I can look down hard enough and try to remember what the earth looked like below the concrete. So I did and found out about a lineage between me and the Richat.. it came to me when I was 25 bc it’s 25 ft in diameter and bc I’m always looking for it.
Anyway, I’ll visit soon.

🫆🌅👁️🌍

#drawing by @billiontekleab

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4 months ago

They Want To Eat Me (And Other Delectable Negros)

Bronze, MDF, gold leaf
Dim: 8.89 cm x 10.16 cm
Chicago, Illinois, 2026

I spent my second semester at SAIC making through bell hooks' "Eating the Other" and Vincent Woodard's works, casting my open, wide, hungry, screaming, muffled mouth and asking who is eating who and do I die when I become consumed? by @billiontekleab

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4 months ago

Oh I forgot to post this taken in Chelsea, Manhattan by @billiontekleab

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4 months ago