Aïda Muluneh

Aïda Muluneh (b. 1974, Ethiopia) is a photographer, artist, and cultural entrepreneur, whose work expresses 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. 

Muluneh became the first black woman to co-curate the Nobel Peace Center exhibition in which to make a photo series on food in war and conflict, done in collaborations with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. She was featured in the exhibition Water Life at Somerset House, the cover of Departures magazine, and Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA. Other recent exhibitions include Reflections of Hope at the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, the Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea, In Their Own Form at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Homebound: A Journey in Photography at the Sharjah Art Museum. She was awarded the 2018 Catchlight Fellowship. In 2017, she participated in Afrique Capitales in Paris and in the Dakar Biennale.  Muluneh founded the Addis Foto Fest, the first international photography festival in Ethiopia. She is in collections including The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture, Detroit Institute of Arts, Toledo Museum of Art, Hood Museum, and National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt Germany titled Aida Muluneh: On The Edge of Past Future as well as participation in Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene at the Nasher Museum of art and Ethiopia at the Crossroads at the Peabody Essex Museum. Current exhibitions include a solo exhibition titled The Homeless Wanderer at theGalleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Milan, Italy as well as the touring group exhibition Reframing Neglect: African Tour, at the Modern Art Museum, Gebre Kristos Desta Center and Addis Ababab in Ethiopia.