Water Life

 June 2022 - Toronto ON

My first visit to the Textile Museum of Canada since the pandemic. I was interested in this exhibit primarily. 

Aïda Muluneh (born 1974) is an Ethiopian photographer and contemporary artist based in Addis Ababa. She does commercial work as well as photojournalism in Addis Ababa and elsewhere.

Muluneh won the European Union Prize at African Photography Encounters and the CRAF International Award of Photography. In 2020, Muluneh was given the Award for Photographic Curatorship of the Royal Photographic Society.

Muluneh was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1974. She spent her childhood in Cyprus, Greece, the UK, and Yemen before settling in Canada in 1985. As a teenager, Muluneh attended Western Canada High School in Alberta, Canada. While there, she was on the school's basketball team and had grand aspirations of becoming a basketball star. She also dreamed of becoming a lawyer or excelling in a similarly respectable profession. These dreams took an unexpected turn when her art teacher opened up a disused darkroom for his students and gave her a camera to use. Although Muluneh began shooting photographs in high school, she did not imagine it as a career until her grandfather, who lived in Ethiopia, came to visit her family. He had served in the Ethiopian Air Force but enjoyed painting in his spare time. He saw something in her work and told her to continue to work as an artist, rather than putting off her passion as a hobby. She received her BA in film, radio, and television from Howard University in 2000. After her studies, she worked as a photojournalist at the Washington Post, and since then, her work has been shown in many publications. She has since returned to Ethiopia and is based in Addis Ababa.

Water Life explores ideas of representation, gender and social justice through an Afrofuturist tableaux of twelve, large-scale images shot in Ethiopia.

The Shackles of Limitations

A Woman's Work

Access and The Meter

Beside the Door

The Burden of the Day

Knowing the Way to Tomorrow

Mirage of Privilege

The Sorrows We Bear

Steps

Unfilled Promises

Muluneh incorporates primary colors into her art photography work. The deep reds, blues, and yellows in her paintings can be seen from a great distance. The primary colors reference church wall paintings that can be seen in Ethiopia.

Muluneh's work also primarily features women due to her belief that there is power in the gaze of a woman. By utilizing subjects that are primarily women, Muluneh is able to share her experience with the world. In an interview with NPR, Muluneh stated, "There's an expression that if you teach something to a man, you teach one person, but if you teach something to a woman, you're teaching the whole society."

Muluneh stated, "My work often starts with a sketch, and I approach each image as a film production in which the character, set design, lighting and styling come together. I utilize face painting as a form in which the inspiration is driven by body ornamentation, not only in my country, but also various parts of the world. I am deeply influenced by various traditional cultures, hence in a sense, I am bringing the past into the future through various forms."