A mask can be made to face backward, treated as evidence of a culture that has finished making itself. Fanuel Leul asks it to face forward. In Afromask, his 2021 series of 101 digital masks, the Ethiopian artist takes a form long capable of carrying ritual and social meaning and imagines its next transformations in a technological environment. The result is not a request for a traditional object to survive unchanged. Leul has said that masks already change as generations make and remake them. His digital works enter that continuity, replacing the hand-carved surface with a modeled one while keeping alive the question of what a face can hold.
Leul works from Addis Ababa and describes his practice as Afrofuturist. He draws, models three-dimensional objects, makes animations and develops stories. His own portfolio places the term Afrofuturism beside a list of works that includes Black Essence, The Nomad Pastors and Longing for the Unknown. An April 2024 article by Edson Mandlate described Afromask as the project that helped him move into full-time digital art. A later conversation with Digital Arts Blog gives a fuller account of the artistic problem behind that move: how can contemporary Ethiopian symbols inhabit future worlds without becoming tokens of an exotic past?
The question is practical as well as philosophical. A digital mask has no weight until an artist assigns it one through shape, shadow and texture. It has no scale until it is placed in relation to a screen, a body or another object. Every modeled ridge suggests a material even when no physical material has been cut. Leul’s industrial design training matters here. He studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts, majoring in industrial design, because he wanted to understand computer graphics and three-dimensional space. He has said that this taught him to think about objects as constructed forms rather than only as images on a page. In Afromask, cultural reference and digital technique meet at the level of construction.
A series of 101 faces
The number 101 gives Afromask a serial logic. One digital mask could be read as a symbol. A hundred and one resist that closure. Each variation implies that no single face, surface or decorative decision can stand for all African mask traditions. Leul calls the works reinvented African digital masks, a phrase that places invention at their center. The series was issued as NFTs in 2021. According to his account, the collection sold out in two hours. That commercial event made continued work possible, but it is not the work’s meaning. The artistic decision is to present a tradition of transformation through a medium that can be replicated, circulated and encountered far from the artist’s studio.
In his Digital Arts Blog interview, Leul explained that continuity interested him more than a simple clash between ancient and modern. Mask makers, he observed, have long added forms and ornaments while preserving a connection to earlier meanings. Digital modeling is his generation’s contribution to that ongoing process. This is a specific claim about how culture develops. It refuses both a museum idea of tradition as fixed and a technology-industry idea of innovation as a clean break. The mask does not need to be stripped of memory before it can enter the future.
The screen changes the mask’s audience. A carved object may belong to a particular community, event or place, with meanings that a distant viewer cannot fully enter. A globally circulating digital image can travel almost instantly. Leul does not present that expanded visibility as a cure for unequal access to art markets. He has described the NFT moment as one opening among several, useful for reaching collectors but dependent on a technology whose future is uncertain. This measured view clarifies the work. The digital medium offers room to construct and distribute images, while the artist still has to decide what those images say and to whom they speak.
The earlier AfroMask II, dated 2020 on Artamine’s artist-representing page, makes those construction choices visible in one object. Against a dark ground, the mask hangs alone, tall and narrow. Its upper portion resembles a ribbed or toothed shell; a small pale plate with code-like lettering crosses the middle; an orange cable curves down one side; and angular dark planes gather into a lower face. The plate interrupts the expectation that a mask must declare its meaning through a familiar carved expression. It suggests an identifier or a manufactured part, while the cable implies connection to a larger system outside the frame. Light catches the side and edges, making the object feel modeled in space rather than drawn as a flat emblem. Its date places it before the 2021 set of 101 masks, an individual experiment that helps show how Leul was testing the face as a site where ornament, equipment and identity might meet. No single mask can contain the full range of that later collection. This one holds a particularly tense relation between the recognizable outline of a mask and the industrial details that refuse an easy reading of its wearer.
From drawing heroes to building worlds
Leul’s entry into speculative art began with childhood drawings of superheroes. In his account, he was drawn to figures moving through dramatic scenes, crossing buildings and testing the scale of their imagined worlds. The excitement was not simply the possession of extraordinary powers. It was the ability to make a character and then invent the surrounding environment. Later he noticed how little African cultural history appeared in the heroic images he admired. That observation changed the source material for his own world building. Ethiopian clothing, architecture, rituals and historical reference became starting points for characters who could belong to a future rather than be imported into it.
This shift can be understood through the difference between a hero and a world. A lone Ethiopian hero placed against a generic science-fiction city might alter representation without altering the terms of the story. Leul wants architecture, objects and customs to interact. He has described moving from drawing single figures to constructing spatial environments in software such as Blender. That method asks where a character stands, what the surroundings are made of and how the social world might give the scene meaning. His industrial design studies helped him think through structure and perspective. The tools make it possible to build a world, but the cultural decisions give that world a history.
His studio Qedamawi develops this approach through Bugnad, a comic project that reworks historical events and cultural memories into fiction. Leul explains that he is not illustrating a historical account panel by panel. He takes material from history and turns it toward mythic and cinematic narrative. The distinction matters for the reader: Bugnad can honor historical experience without claiming that its heroes and events are documentary records. It uses the license of fiction to test what those experiences might make possible in a speculative universe.
A comic adds sequence to Leul’s practice. A digital image may place many temporal suggestions in a single frame; a drawn story can ask a figure to act, hesitate and change. The hero has to do more than look ready for a future. They must move through its consequences. Leul names courage, resilience and unity among the values he wants his fictional heroes to carry. Those values can become generic if they are detached from a world. In Bugnad, their force depends on the situations the comic invents and the cultural memory from which its conflicts emerge. The serial form leaves room for complexity: a character can encounter a limit, revise a plan or discover that the first image of heroism was incomplete.
Ethiopia in the present tense
Leul distinguishes his location from some diasporic approaches to Afrofuturism. His first-person account places him within living Ethiopian surroundings. Traditional clothing, rituals and buildings are part of the landscape he encounters, rather than fragments reconstructed only from elsewhere. He does not treat this as a claim to a purer form of future making. It changes the task before him. He is extending practices that continue in the present, asking how they might look if contemporary technologies became part of their development.
That perspective gives his images a distinctive tension. A futuristic costume can easily become a shortcut for novelty; a recognizable cultural object can easily become shorthand for an entire continent. Leul’s strongest proposition lies between those risks. The forms he chooses must remain open to alteration without losing their particularity. He calls his works “souvenirs for the future,” suggesting an object that future viewers could recognize as carrying memory from our present. A souvenir ordinarily points backward to a place already visited. His phrase changes its direction. He wants to make a trace for people who have not yet arrived.
The phrase finds a different expression in Longing for the Unknown 2, a project Leul published in 2023. In his accompanying account, he describes a search for a home that feels real without being reducible to a physical address. The project’s opening composition crowds dark-skinned figures wearing luminous horizontal visors beneath a red-brown sky. Several lift their arms; painted planetary spheres float between them. A later composition sets a much larger purple and ochre orb at the center, ringed by bodies with differently coloured devices across their eyes. The repeated visors make seeing itself a shared technological condition, but the figures do not all pose alike. In another image, one person in a dark jacket, white collar and narrow tie faces forward against a rust-red ground while three planet-shaped balloons rise on long strings beside him. The shift from group to solitary portrait gives Leul’s question about home two scales: belonging among others, and a private search that cannot be completed by the crowd. Those orbs do not map an arrival point. They keep other worlds visibly near the figures, close enough to be held by a string or almost touched, but too large and strange to become an ordinary address. The project’s image sequence gives uncertainty a form that is playful, crowded and at times still.
That interior journey widens the range of Leul’s speculative practice. Artamine also lists Exodus, Short Stop and The Salt Miner, while Leul’s portfolio includes Black Essence and Tranquil Seas. Their existence demonstrates that Afromask is one series within a larger digital practice. The question connecting his projects is how to let different kinds of experience occupy a future image. Leul’s own explanation gives a reason to attend to these registers: he wants joy, beauty and everyday scenes in African futures, not only images of struggle. That aim does not erase violence or political conflict. It enlarges the emotional and social life a speculative world can contain. A world made only of heroes and crises would be as narrow as the stereotypes he is working against.
Technology as material and route
Digital art is sometimes discussed as though a software tool produced the image by itself. Leul’s practice makes that impossible to sustain. Drawing, modeling and animation require choices about relation: how a face sits in a mask, how a building locates a figure, how light makes a modeled edge feel hard or yielding. He has said that studying industrial design turned his attention to the way objects occupy space. That is a different discipline from applying a futuristic filter to a familiar photograph. The work’s speculative force comes from designing structures with enough coherence to be inhabited by an imagined story.
The same technology is also a route to audiences. Afromask reached collectors through a digital market that bypassed some local exhibition gates. Leul speaks of that opportunity without making blockchain the permanent answer to unequal access. He argues that a clear artistic language remains more important than any platform. This is borne out by the breadth of his practice: the masks have a serial marketplace life; the comic has a narrative life; individual images circulate as portfolio works; and his modeling skill can be applied to new kinds of spatial experience. No single delivery system contains the whole practice.
There are wider stakes to this plurality. For artists working from Addis Ababa, international attention has often arrived through institutions that decide which images of Africa are legible to outside audiences. Leul wants to shape the visual account from within the place he knows. Digital tools can widen the route by which the account travels, but the aim is not simply export. A young viewer in Ethiopia may also see a future inhabited by characters whose clothes, architecture and references were not added as afterthoughts. The circulation is global; the imaginative address is not limited to a distant market. Krull’s report from the 1-54 fair in Marrakech offers a view of another route by which contemporary African art meets international audiences, through a physical fair rather than Leul’s digital marketplace. Both settings make the question of who controls an artwork’s story newly visible.
Leul has spoken of optimism as a deliberate part of his work. That word can sound light until one asks what an image must resist in order to remain hopeful. His answer concerns the repeated depiction of the African continent chiefly through conflict and scarcity. Joy does not deny those conditions. It insists that they do not exhaust the present or dictate every possible future. The claim becomes more persuasive when his work gives that joy a form: a mask able to change, a hero whose story begins from local memory, a landscape large enough to contain an ordinary pause. Hope is not an atmosphere added after the design; it is one of the reasons for building the world in the first place.
A future that keeps its sources
The movement from Afromask to Bugnad reveals how Leul has widened his ambitions without abandoning the first question. A mask is a face made through accumulated choices; a comic universe is a society made through accumulated choices. Both ask how cultural material persists when it is transformed. He does not propose that every Ethiopian story should wear a spacecraft’s shell or that every traditional form should be digitized. His art shows one maker using current tools to imagine forms that can carry memory into an unvisited time.
This is what gives the work its place in Afrofuturism. Leul names the movement himself, but his images and projects also make its central operation visible. They refuse to let African histories become merely the preface to someone else’s future. From Addis Ababa, he makes masks, characters and environments that ask what follows when those histories remain active sources of invention. The answer is not one final picture. It is a practice of making, revising and making again, with enough room for the next generation to alter the face.