In the late 1970s, Tafesse completed his artistic training at the University School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His teachers were Worku Goshu, Abdul Rahman Sherif, Wosene Kosrof, Feleke Armide and Zerihun Yetimgeta. Later, in the diaspora, he studied at the National Academy of Arts, University of Sofia, Bulgaria, where he obtained his Master of Arts (M.A.). He continued his postgraduate studies in painting, between 1992 and 1995, at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Antwerp. Since then, he has been living in Belgium, though frequently visiting Addis Ababa, where he remains involved in his home country's contemporary art scene. In 2012 he received his PhD cum laude from the University of La Laguna in Tenerife.
Tafesse is an artist who produces a predominantly pictorial work. Captivated by visual culture, his ideas are reflections on modern and contemporary African art. In Polémica personal, you can see six works of medium and small format, of figures and portraits. His subjects could be both known and strange, or private, but also public. His works reflect an interest in the artistic tradition, although, nevertheless, they look contemporary because of the use of the media as the origin of the subjects. He uses "his" images, those of the telephone, and reorganizes them according to his interests and aesthetic propensity. His subjects usually inhabit cafeterias or other public spaces. At other times, he tends to reinterpret his older paintings, redrawing, again and again, exhaustively.
Closely related to his activity as an artist is his research work on East African art. In his essay Ethiopian Modern Art he narrates the historical art scene of Addis Ababa, the place of its modernist pioneers. His book Towards African Mimesis: Regarding East Africa's Art Scene Now deepens this vision, and explores the new art of the African Diaspora.