Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Exploring Aida Muluneh’s Surreal Photographs

Photographer Aida Muluneh has lived all over the world, but it was in returning to Ethiopia that she found inspiration for her latest body of work. Muluneh's first solo exhibition for David Kruts Projects in New York City was titled “The World is 9,” and it featured new images from the artist. The title comes from something the artist’s grandmother used to say: “The world is 9. It is never complete and never perfect.”

Photographer Aida Muluneh has lived all over the world, but it was in returning to Ethiopia that she found inspiration for her latest body of work. Muluneh’s first solo exhibition for David Kruts Projects in New York City was titled “The World is 9,” and it featured new images from the artist. The title comes from something the artist’s grandmother used to say: “The world is 9. It is never complete and never perfect.”

In an official statement, Muluneh says this of her new work: “I am not seeking answers but asking provocative questions about the life that we live – as people, as nations, as beings.” The artist maintains that the vibrant colors in the exhibition are intended to convey passion, a point of entry that is meant to both enrapture and disturb. “The more loving one (Part One)” is an example of that boldness, as the subject walks from one freestanding red ladder to the next, against a bluesky backdrop. “The more loving one (Part Two)” features the same cloaked figure, now bundled on the ground below.


All of the works in this exhibition were created this year. Since entering the national scene in the early 2000s, Muluneh’s photographic works have found homes in the permanent collection of Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (and Hood Museum, the Museum of Biblical Art, and Sindika Dokolo Foundation in Berlin.) The artist is based in Addis Ababa, where she founded the first international photography festival in Ethiopia, Addis Foto Fest.




Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
The painting style of Moscow based artist Andrey Remnev lies somewhere between antiquity and contemporary. One look at his work, and it should come as no surprise that he studied painting at the Holy Andronic monastery in Moscow for eight years. The site is home to some of the most precious examples of Russian Orthodox art, from which Remnev borrows his techniques and palette of natural pigments. "My paintings are distinguished by attention to detail and meticulous decorating a conditional Russian style. Other works are written in a different, more symbolic way... I tried to convey a sense of wonder, the unique experience of touching the mystery," he says.
Karine Rougier’s mystical "Wild waves in our hands" touches both on our tribal nature and explores femininity. The show is staged at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in New York City throughout the month. On the show, the gallery says this: “Women are Rougier’s muses; poetry her nourishment: an ode to Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, les Métamorphoses d’Ovide.”
On December 13th at 80Forty gallery, Lola will debut her first major exhibition in two years, and perhaps her most personal, "The Younger". Her new series of twenty oil paintings also includes some of her largest to date. When we visited her studio in Los Angeles this week, she described it as "something to really get lost in". Her childish characters embark from their storybook lands into unfamiliar territory- Lola's childhood reality. The spirit of a 'younger' Lola is present in images of freckled young girls playing with reimaginatings of toys like Pacman and Pez. In this new world drawn from memory, Lola tells us the story of her creative upbringing. We took a moment to discuss her exhibition while she worked.
Exquisitely long hair is an age-old hallmark of femininity — one that Czech photographer Bara Prasilova humorously subverts with a photo series that features models with impossibly long braids. While the length of a heroine's braid was always a point of praise in Eastern European folklore, Prasilova takes this aesthetic preference to its extreme. Her models use their braids as scarves and jump ropes. One woman casually lies on her stomach like a teenager talking on the phone, her ankles tethered to her head with braids that act as leg warmers.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List