Dubai’s contemporary art scene welcomes a powerful new voice this season with This Bloom I Borrow, the latest solo exhibition by Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh, on view at Efie Gallery in Alserkal Avenue.

Known for her bold visual language and theatrical photographic style, Muluneh creates striking images that blur the boundaries between photography, painting, and performance. Her work is deeply rooted in African heritage while speaking to universal themes such as identity, womanhood, memory, and transformation.

In This Bloom I Borrow, Muluneh presents a series of never-before-seen works created using body-painted models and carefully constructed, hand-painted backdrops. The compositions are bold and geometric, dominated by vibrant primary colours and recurring symbols — eyes, masks, keys, flowers, and ancestral motifs — each carrying layers of cultural and emotional meaning.

What makes this series especially compelling is its tactile quality. Each photograph is hand-finished, giving the work a painterly surface that turns every piece into a unique object rather than a simple reproduction. The result is a collection that feels intimate, ceremonial, and timeless.

Through these images, Muluneh explores the dualities that shape human existence: the visible and the hidden, power and vulnerability, faith and doubt, personal memory and collective history. Her work invites viewers not only to look, but to reflect — on who we are, where we come from, and how culture shapes our sense of self.

Presented in Dubai — a city that sits at the crossroads of cultures — This Bloom I Borrow becomes a quiet yet powerful dialogue between Africa and the Middle East, tradition and contemporary expression, the personal and the universal.