Yatreda

Biography

Yatreda is a family of artists from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, whose collective practice is rooted in the concept of tizita, a distinctly Ethiopian sense of nostalgia and longing for the past. Working across motion portraiture and video, the collective produces richly costumed, cinematic digital works that document Ethiopian cultural practices, mythology, and history, treating dress, gesture, and ritual as living archives rather than static historical record. Their acclaimed series Andromeda of Aethiopia reimagines the ancient Ethiopian setting of the Perseus and Andromeda myth through motion portraits of royal families, warriors, and constellations, restoring an African presence to a story frequently depicted without one. At Art Dubai Special Edition 2026, presented by Plan X, Yatreda showed documentation of two forms of living cultural practice: Sedea, a traditional Ethiopian dance, and Zewed, a ritual battle, with every physical sculpture in the booth paired with a digital companion edition. Crucially, none of this documentation is AI-generated; the images and footage are real, produced with extraordinary attention to costume, choreography, and craft, foregrounding questions of memory, transmission, and what it means to preserve embodied cultural practice against the flattening tendencies of contemporary image culture. Yatreda's work has been widely recognized in the digital art space for its production quality and cultural specificity, and the collective continues to expand its body of work through series including Strong Hair and Tizita.