Abena Motaboli is a Chicago based educator, facilitator, and visual artist. She obtained her bachelor's degree in Fine Arts at Columbia College Chicago and at L'institut Catholique de Paris. 

 

Her art practice is performative, contemplative, and transformative. 

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Influenced by her home country Lesotho and Southern African culture, she invites the audience to find a space to contemplate amidst the chaos that surrounds us in the modern world. "I am intrigued with the idea of displacement and trying to find comfort in being through sound, installation, and space." She invites the audience to find the white spaces and contemplate amidst the chaos which surrounds us in the modern world."

 

Growing up in international communities, and being an immigrant, she is strongly influenced by the diversity of people, the African diaspora, the other, and ideas of human resilience seen through immigration.

 

Her medium includes plastic installations, painting, and meticulous, meditative lines. She uses tea, dirt, coffee, cardboard, charcoal, tissue, earth, and ephemeral material to reference her culture of making from what is available and to comment on colonialism, displacement, and her past memories.

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Abena's work has been exhibited in Chicago, Miami and London