Neon Soul, January 2023
AI-generated image (DALL-E, Night Café)
Courage, December 2021
Digital painting
Ethiopian artist Lidiya Zelke is based in Addis Ababa and works with a wide range of photography, graphic design, and digital/traditional painting. She is interested in beauty and boldness, working to capture the complexities of empowerment in visual form. Courage is a digital painting in Zelke’s Beyond Earth series, which makes connections between earthly and celestial space. The painting is inspired by the planet Saturn – its cosmic power is embodied in the powerful figure of an African woman. In 2022, Zelke began applying these concepts to artificial intelligence image generation using Stable Diffusion. Neon Soul is one example of this project; it examines AI’s ability to process abstract ideas such as empowerment, feminism, and boldness, manifesting those ideas in the African female figure.
Artist Bio
Lidiya Zelke is a multi-disciplinary artist from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She works at different organizations as a graphic designer and creative director. Her artworks usually tell stories of inner feelings, how they reveal and create layers of ourselves in experiences of excitement, anticipation, and loneliness, and how they crack and polish us through the journey of life by changing us irreversibly without us even sensing it. Lidiya was awarded Judges Choice Award for her Neon Girl piece by Northern Light Gallery, and has participated in different local and international exhibitions including Heylayer's SATOSHE and HERNFT Project as one of the 20 selected artists from all over the world. She is also one of the five artists selected from Africa to participate in the KIPAYA (What's new) exhibition prepared by FORMAT Festivals, FOTEA-new art city, Tropical Exhibition curated by De curated gallery, and participated in the 5th Pasa festival and African Metaverse exhibition. Her works have been published in various magazines such as Fèroce Magazine UK, En Vie Magazine, Post script Magazine, Espacio Fronterizo Borderland Magazine, Vagus Magazine, Picton Magazine, and the Vogue Italy website.