Aïda Muluneh’s (b. 1974, Ethiopia) is a photographer, artist, and cultural entrepreneur, whose works express what it is to be an African woman, to encapsulate gender and identity, and to situate it within the colonial experience.

Her series, The Road of Glory, focuses on past historical events of mass suffering in ten different countries. Using direct symbolic references combined with her illustrative compositions, Muluneh focuses not on an exacting documentation of death, but an artistic expression that provokes further inquiry. Looking to her background as a photojournalist, Muluneh uses a foundation of visual and symbolic language to reference an event beyond herself. By including herself in the images, she addresses the often-exploitive history of photographing tragedy and creates a provoking image with the insertion of her own perspective and identity.

Aïda Muluneh’s stark, stylized portrait photography captures the facts and fictions of postcolonial Africa. In 1904, when the Herero people began an uprising against the German colonial forces of what is currently Namibia, the German General Lothar von Trotha ordered the Herero into the scorching Kalahari desert, and cut off their access to food and water. German soldiers were ordered to shoot any Herero who came close to the water sources. Dressed in face paint and theatrical garments, Muluneh’s female subjects stand against bold, graphic backdrops as they conjure daily life and performances of gender and identity in the photographer’s home city, Addis Ababa.