Photos:  Viviane Sassen



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Women Photographers Redefining Surrealism for the 21st Century
​by James Parlou  | Mar 27 2020
ART & DESIGN

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Aïda Muluneh

Aïda Muluneh was a photojournalist for the Washington Post before she began experimenting with her artistic voice. Muluneh creates stylized and colourful Afrofuturist images that explore her own selfhood as an Ethiopian woman, as well as her broader African identity. Body paint is a hallmark of her work, used to reference African tradition while presenting her subjects “as different characters void of nationality and ethnicity, like blank slates,” she told The Guardian in 2017. 

​Muluneh was born in Ethiopia but spent much of her life abroad before returning to her country of birth.
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Hannah Whitaker

Her colour photographs vary in subject matter, from female nudes to landscapes, to lunar eclipses, to close-ups of natural materials that emphasize texture over content, like marble in an ancient Greek quarry and lava from a Hawaiian volcano. The latter, depicted in Lava (2012), draws viewers in with its beautiful, glistening black surface that recalls the iridescence of black oil paint. 
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​Affirming critics’ description of her work as painterly, Whitaker admits her practice has “an obvious connection to painting...with all its drips and paint-like materials.” She produces some photographs in a straightforward manner, while others, such as Napoleon’s Tomb (2012), involve controlled experimentation wherein she re-exposes her film using a hand-made film slide with holes in it to obscure parts of the image with light leaks.
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Lucy Fainzilber

Lush florals, colourful vegetables, and radiant textiles find harmony in the work of Argentinian photographer Lucia Fainzilber. In her self-portrait series “Somewear” (2014), she loosely camouflages her figure by coordinating fabrics with her surroundings to often-uncanny results. In her still-life series “The Cookbook” (2019), she echoes the colors and textures of petals or fruit in the tableware it sits on. The effect of her work is a mesmerizing assemblage that draws from her background as an art director, costume designer, and colorist. Fainzilber’s dreamlike still lifes and portraits balance fine art and editorial sensibilities.
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