UNTITLED, THE PALACE OF FINE ARTS SAN FRANCISCO

UNTITLED, SAN FRANCISCO

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

12 - 14 JANUARY 2018

THE PALACE OF FINE ARTS

Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents the work of Lalla Essaydi, Aida Muluneh, Blessing Ngobeni, Deborah Roberts, and Vaughn Spann.

Ethiopian photographer, artist, and cultural entrepreneur, Aida Muluneh’s vibrant photographs express what it is to be an African woman, to encapsulate gender and identity, and to situate it within the colonial experience. Muluneh’s recent photographs from the series The Memory of Hope, explores the optimism that once defined her youth. She recalls what is was like to embrace hope with excitement and confidence, and having a strong opinion regarding what was right and wrong in the world. The reality she discovered with age reflected a much darker side of humanity than she could ever have expected. Through the series, Muluneh aims to amplify what we try not to hear, nor see. She makes us witnesses as she takes action. 

She is currently participating in the group show Being: New Photography 2018 at MoMA. She is also at Purdue University with her solo exhibition Aida Muluneh: The Memory of Hope, as well as documenting the Ethiopian drought as a photojournalist for the Washington Post. Muluneh participated in Afrique Capitales in Paris 2017 and in the Dakar Biennale in 2016. She uses art to promote cultural development through her organization DESTA (Developing and Educating Society Through Art), and she is the founder of the Addis Foto Fest, the first international photography festival in Ethiopia. She is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. Muluneh received the 2007 European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali and was the 2010 winner of the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy.