Gize is an artist collective founded in February 2020 by Berhanu Ashagrie, Helen Zeru, Robel Temesgen, and Tesfaye Bekele, emerging from the collaborative exhibition project Coming-together, held at Kunsthall Oslo in Oslo. Formed with a spirit of informality and temporality, Gize challenges conventional notions of collectivity, positioning itself as a protest against systemic constraints that hinder professional and political solidarity. Rooted in creative, pedagogical, and political engagement, the collective seeks to reimagine worldmaking through shared artistic processes. The name Gize, an Amharic term evoking time as force, motion, and transformation, encapsulates the collective’s ethos of evolving through events and encounters.

Coming-together served as the catalyst for Gize’s formation, bringing the four artists into dialogue across geographies and disciplines. The exhibition explored themes of proximity, displacement, and the politics of gathering, offering a platform for collaborative reflection on the conditions and possibilities of togetherness. Since then, Gize has continued to operate as a fluid and responsive entity, engaging in projects that interrogate the structures of art-making and collective agency.

Gize is set to dissolve in five years’ time.