Starting June 12, the Playlist Gallery by Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan presents a solo exhibition by Aïda Muluneh, a visionary artist who has transformed the visual narrative of the African continent.
On view through July 30, 2025, the exhibition takes its title, The Homeless Wanderer, from a composition by Ethiopian pianist and composer Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, in keeping with the gallery’s tradition of naming shows after musical pieces.
A former photojournalist for The Washington Post, Muluneh has exhibited at major international institutions, including MoMA and Tate, and is the founder of influential festivals and platforms dedicated to African photography.
With a striking and unmistakable visual language, Muluneh redraws the image of contemporary Africa in a way that resonates universally. While firmly grounded in the iconography and spirit of her homeland, her photographic style transcends borders and challenges the limitations and short-sightedness of the Western gaze, offering an evocative yet precise means of storytelling.
Suspended between photography and painting, Muluneh’s work portrays an Africa populated by hieratic female figures, guardians of ancestral memory. Her images intentionally break away from stereotypical representations of the continent, instead distilling visual expression to its essence through the use of primary colours, geometric forms, and careful composition. Beneath this apparent simplicity lies a profound and ongoing exploration of the connections between land, ancestry, post-colonialism, and hope for the future.
The exhibition is titled “Homeless Wanderer.” What inspired this name, and what does it signify in the context of your work?
The title “Homeless Wanderer” is inspired by a song by Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, whose piano compositions evoke deep memory and nostalgia. Her music mirrors the spirit of this collection, which spans different periods of my work across East and West Africa. The phrase reflects a personal and collective sense of displacement, a feeling of belonging everywhere and nowhere. It speaks to the in-betweenness of identity and the search for self through land, memory, and time. My work traces the invisible borders between myth and memory, body and land, the seen and the felt.
You ve spent many years as a photojournalist for The Washington Post. How did that experience shape your current artistic practice, which is often described as dreamlike and suspended in time?
Working as a photojournalist for many years taught me two essential things: how to construct a story through images and how to anticipate moments. Through my travels and work on diverse subjects, I began to encounter experiences and emotions that couldn’t be fully expressed within the confines of photojournalism. While my artistic practice is rooted in that experience, it became a space to revisit moments, memories, and questions that journalism could not hold. Photojournalism taught me the discipline of observation, the urgency to document, and the ethics of seeing. But over time, I became more drawn to what lies beyond the frame, the silences, the emotional residue, the unseen histories. My work emerges from that tension between documenting external truths and exploring something more internal and symbolic. That’s why my imagery exists within its own universe.
Your work captures a vision of Africa that Jacqueline Ceresoli describes as “untouched by Western cultural colonization.” You’ve mentioned that to truly engage with this vision, you needed to be physically immersed in the land and its communities. Can you elaborate on how this connection informs your process?
I often say I wouldn t be making the same work if I still lived in the West. Returning to my birthplace was essential, I had to learn about the land, the history, the people, and the power of quiet moments. From afar, Ethiopia can feel like an illusion or a faded dream, but living within it revealed its many layers. This unmasking was crucial to understanding my people.
Over the past 17 years of living in Africa, I’ve come to see it as a place that gives me hope a space of resilience, movement, light, and faith in tomorrow. It’s been the greatest education of my life. Working in Ethiopia and Côte d Ivoire taught me local realities and deepened my understanding of globalization. It also helped me discover my visual language, which I carried into projects like “The Necessity of Seeing” photographed across four UK cities as part of the UK city of culture. That project taught me that while space sets the scene, it’s the emotional resonance of the image that transcends time and geography. To create work that is rooted rather than imposed, I must listen to the land, the people, the passing conversations of daily life. Immersion allows me to be a student, learning from each encounter. Inspiration is often fleeting and elusive, which means, as artists, we must be perceptive to both the seen and the unseen. I don’t document from a distance; I live, learn, and grow within the communities I photograph. The land is not a backdrop it is a collaborator, a witness, a keeper of memory.
Your recent project explores the African feminine as intrinsically linked to the land itself. What drew you to investigate femininity in this way? And in what ways do you think this perspective challenges or complements existing portrayals of women in African visual culture?
I’m not simply exploring these themes, they are lived experiences, stories I’ve witnessed, inherited, or carried. I’m often asked why the characters in my images are women? And my response is simple: I am a woman telling my own stories through my work. I come from a history and culture where women have played significant roles as leaders, nurturers, warriors, and spiritual figures. My upbringing was not rooted in the idea that women are secondary, but rather in the understanding that they are central to the fabric of society. This perspective naturally shapes my work and the way I choose to represent the feminine, as powerful, present, and essential.
Your art combines physical materials—photographic prints, paint, framing—with a minimalist and almost abstract aesthetic. How do you navigate the tension between materiality and abstraction?
I think of my process as layering time. The photograph is the first gesture, but it remains incomplete without touch. I often build sets composed of painted backdrops, symbolic objects, and carefully constructed environments where each element plays a role. Viewers sometimes ask if the final work is a painting, which speaks to the blurred line I navigate between photography and other forms. By painting over the backdrop and the characters, and at times obscuring parts of the image, I invite the viewer to look again, to feel rather than simply see. Abstraction allows me to express what cannot be explained such as grief, longing, spirit and to transform memory into myth, and image into experience.
Your photography proposes an expanded, reimagined view of Africa. What does this vision encompass, and which dominant narratives or assumptions do you hope to challenge or dismantle through your work?
Photography, for me, is far more than pressing a button, it’s a layered process rooted in questioning. In a world oversaturated with images, I often ask: What role does Africa play in this global visual dialogue? Narratives about Africa’s past, present, and future are too often shaped by narrow perspectives and hidden agendas. Having lived in many places, I’ve gained a vantage point that allows my work to be both universal and deeply rooted in Africa, challenging perceptions and offering viewers a new way of seeing. Whether through exhibitions, teaching, or organizing Africa Foto Fair, my goal has always been to educate through art. For real change to happen, education must be the foundation not only for Africans, but also for those outside the continent, who often encounter Africa through filtered or incomplete portrayals, far from the richness of its lived reality.
