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I Promise to Burn Forever
Curated by Sati Varghese-Mac
Public Functionary, Gallery #144, Minneapolis, MN
September 6th - October 11th, 2025
A show on the growing technological presence that reduces and divides our memory.

A Prayer for Marking Time, 2025

Barakah Library, 2025

Warqitee and Bilal, 2025

Barakah Library, 2025

Barakah Library, 2025

Karaa Tokkoof Balbala Lamatu Jira/ An Opening for Multiplicity, 2025

Barakah Garden, 2025

© 2025 AGARTUU INOR

“I remember this fear that was also rooted in the realization that there's nowhere to go. Minnesota is on fire, Oromia is on fire. Everywhere is on fire. There's only where I became. There's nowhere to return to.”

-Agartuu on being Black, Oromo and Minnesotan in 2020

Barakah Garden is a computationally programmed, internet-based memorial garden. It is a garden that glitches and burns, echoing the gardens that Oromo protesters set ablaze in acts of resistance against human rights violations. The Oromo, a largely pastoral people, have long used both land and community as sites of care and memory. In the contemporary moment, the internet has become a crucial space for organizing these protests. I grew Barakah Garden to memorialize that intersection of tradition, protest, and digital presence.

The books within the installation form Barakah Library, a fountain of knowledge, featuring works by Black and Indigenous authors across time, emphasizing the persistence and continuity of knowledge, memory, and cultural resilience.

Whenever possible, I try to include proof of life alongside any work that memorializes someone or something lost. Too often, Indigenous people are dehumanized because our existence is erased, our personhood denied through the absence of evidence that we lived. Below is a glimpse into my childhood and into what resistance means to me.
_

Bara sanatti, bimbiin bullee bareduu natii fakatee.

Of course, in those days, everything that glittered was sparkle to me. Qulquluu, I wanted nothing more than to sit at the hillside in Finfinnee and investigate the infinite abyss of only-God-knows-what-that-is. From there, I could see the mountains where my mother and her mother and her mother’s mother were born.

Broken Mirinda bottles caught the sun. Coca Cola bottles too. Rainbows formed in the mud. Street cats fought the neighborhood guard dogs. Banana trees offered their shade, their leaves wide and kind. Nothing stayed still for long.

My grandmother’s garden was different. Quieter. Songbirds came early, dipping their beaks into shiny pink flowers that reminded me of my Barbie’s slippers. Sometimes my uncle lifted me so I could see over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard. We grew sugarcane, but every day we made my grandmother’s favorite coconut banana smoothies with raw honey instead.

We played mancala.
My grandmother always won because she was dying.
We laughed.
She cried, so I did too.

Our home sat next to the hill everyone warned me about. Despite the constant talk of death and impending doom, falling did not occur to me as something that could happen. Between the mud’s grip on my shoes and my aunt Hiba’s hands on my shoulders, I was more worried about sinking.

Once, my uncle Yakub took me there. He was a storyteller, and he liked to spook you out. He told me there were bones at the bottom. That some of them were human. He told me about a boy my age who fell and was never rescued, how his mother sent him food and water in a sack at the end of a stick. He told me it did not last. I believed him. The hill was bottomless. It kept what no one could save.

I loved Oromia as I knew it. I loved it until Sunday came.

Every Sunday, bright in the early morning before the sun came up, the sky seemed to cry. A thundering voice rolled over the hill and into our home, almost humming. It was always the same. Strong, but aged. Even at seven years old, I understood it to be terrifyingly beautiful. It sounded the way waterfalls looked.

One Sunday, I lay beside my grandmother and heard her voice rise above the sound.

Ya Hayyu.
Ya Qayyum.

She repeated it again and again. Like a lullaby. The hill stayed quiet.

I did not understand the words,
but I felt their weight in the early morning.
I said them anyway, rolling them on my tongue,
letting the sound fill the spaces between the garden and the hill.

After she was gone, I realized I had started saying them to myself,
small whispers in empty rooms,
echoes of her voice that no one else could hear.

My mother told me what they meant:
she had been praising God, using two of His names.

I repeated them again, now understanding,
and the sound felt like a hand holding mine across time.

Oh Ever-Living.
Oh Sustainer.

Shortly after I returned to the States, my grandmother died. At her funeral, people asked how I could be so sad, doubting that I even knew her. But one summer was enough, one summer to love her, to hold her in memory, to dedicate my life to understanding her.

Itiyeen tiyya teeun made sense to me.

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