He was born in 1984 in Addis Abeba, now living in the district Kotabe in the Ethiopian Capital.

His studio is in the Asni Art Village. There is an artist community based which is situated in the

dilapidated residence of the former imperial minister of finance Ras Zewde Gebre Selassie in the

district Firenzey. Henok at first had registered for Physics at the Debub  University when in 2003

he changed to the School of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Addis Abeba. After five

years of education with Mezgebu Tesemma, Tadesse Mesfin, Negatu Tszehay, Bekele Mekonnen

and Abdurahman Sherif amongst others, he achieved a bachelor’s degree in painting in 2008 and

was given two awards by the University of Addis Abeba and a scholarship by the Ethiopian

Association of Japan. Since then he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and was

able to increase his artistic horizon. He experiments on painting, video installations, as performer

as well as photographer and likes to provoke by colours and at times insinuating contents. He

works on topics like the lasting decay of the city, the volume of traffic, prostitution and the moral

decay in society. He gets his ideas from experimenting with different materials which he is testing

and, if they have a convincing force, converting into a mouthpiece of his inner creative world.

© Text: Kerstin Volker-Saad, Berlin (Katalog: Free Art Felega III, Goethe-Institut Addis Abeba)