News
-
January 8, 2025
Exhibition — Ukupupuka: An Exploration of Transcendence
A solo exhibition at the Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery, UC Santa Cruz, January 8 – February 8, 2025. Ukupupuka means flight in Bemba. The show seeks visual avenues of elevation beyond physical limits, recovering the stories of marginalized Africans who took part in events like the First World War. In the Afronauts series, drawn from Edward Mukuka Nkoloso's 1964 space programme, the figures wear halos instead of helmets.
-
September 23, 2024
Exhibition — Simple Commodities: Ba Zambia Twa Fika Pesa?
A solo exhibition at the Lechwe Trust in Lusaka, curated by Sana Ginwalla, on view through October 3, 2024. Marking Zambia's sixty years of independence, the show opens with the installation Ba, Zambia, twafika pesa? — Zambia, where have we reached? — asking what freedom has brought amid the energy crisis and the rising cost of bread, mealie meal and fuel, and proposing an Africanfuturist way forward.
Read the announcement at UCSC History of Art and Visual Culture
-
December 31, 2023
30 Years of Afrofuturism in Nkwazi Magazine
An article written and illustrated by Mulenga for Nkwazi on Zambia's contributions to Afrofuturism — from Edward Mukuka Nkoloso's 1960s space programme and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift to the Afronauts series and the work of Stary Mwaba, Mwenya B. Kabwe and Masiyaleti Mbewe.
-
November 2022
The Afronauts in Colours of Africa
The Afronauts (2020) is featured in Colours of Africa, an online exhibition by Design Indaba and Google Arts & Culture in which 60 African creatives each chose a colour to represent their home country. For Zambia, Mulenga chose copper — the country's leading export — tying it to hope, to the copper crosses once used as currency, and to Edward Mukuka Nkoloso's 1960s Zambian space programme.
-
2022
Ukupupuka: Transcendence, Flight and Inculturation in Zambian Devotional Artwork
An essay in Root Work Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1 — the Summoning Flight special issue. It traces transcendence, the spirit lifted beyond the body, through Eurocentric Christian iconography and Zambian cultural practice, setting objects of spiritual flight held in Zambian museums alongside Biblical texts about flight.