Aïda Muluneh at Galerie 38: When Photography Becomes a World of Its Own

There are artists who document reality, and there are artists who reimagine it entirely. Aïda Muluneh belongs to the second category, firmly and unapologetically. The Ethiopian photographer and visual artist is currently at the heart of Casablanca’s cultural scene with A Real Fiction, an exhibition running at Galerie 38 from May 21 to June 27, 2026. The show is both an introduction and an immersion, a rare opportunity to experience firsthand the work of one of contemporary African photography’s most compelling voices.

A Language Built From Color and Form

Muluneh’s trajectory is one of deliberate evolution. Trained in cinema, she entered the world of photography through the documentary tradition, where she developed a precise, respectful eye for the invisible and the overlooked. Her early work, rendered in black and white, carried the quiet dignity of images that let their subjects speak. But over time, something shifted. Color entered her practice not as decoration but as architecture. A restricted, highly symbolic palette became the backbone of her visual grammar, where each tone carries weight, and nothing is arbitrary.

The result is immediately recognizable: bodies, often frontal and composed, placed within stripped-back, theatrical spaces. Every image reads less like a photograph and more like a painting that has been thinking for a very long time. It is a body of work that sits at the crossroads of photography, visual art, and performance, resistant to easy categorization, which is precisely where it gains its power.

Between Memory, Spirituality and the Rewriting of History

A Real Fiction is built on the tension its title names. Muluneh is not interested in the documentary photograph as a mirror of the world. She is interested in what happens when you push the image further, when you construct a scene rather than capture one, and when that construction becomes a vehicle for something deeper than representation.

Across the works on view at Galerie 38, themes of memory, spirituality, and cultural heritage converge. Her figures move through spaces charged with symbolism, caught in moments that feel ancient and immediate at once. There is a deliberate ambiguity at play, inviting the viewer not to decode but to feel, to bring their own history to the surface of the image.

For Casablanca, a city increasingly positioned as a destination for serious contemporary art, this exhibition is significant. Galerie 38 continues to make a strong case for showing work that challenges its audience, and Muluneh is exactly the kind of artist capable of shifting a conversation.

A Real Fiction runs through June 27, 2026, at Galerie 38, Casablanca.