This Is Where I Am

BY AÏDA MULUNEH

“Poetry,” Auden wrote, “makes nothing happen.” Or maybe it just takes its time. Five decades after Ethiopian poet Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin wrote his dagger of a poem, “This is Where I Am,” a fellow countrywoman takes his work as provocation for an arresting series of photographs that comprise Public Art Fund’s most globally-distributed installment to date. More than 300 bus stops across New York City, Chicago, Boston, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire showcase Aïda Muluneh’s vibrant, startling, transportive images.

In one photograph, two white-masked women sit in scarlet Van Gogh chairs on either side of a yellow obelisk that splits the photograph. Above them, a parade of redrobed women hoist brooms like militia during drills. In another, the locks of three women converge in the center of a photograph. Two frame-facing figures stand back-to-back in profile, symmetrically tilting red jebena, traditional Ethiopian coffee pots. In the foreground, a regal figure draped in red turns her head slightly toward the frame—and suddenly flashes her eyes back at the viewer. In accusation? Defense? Invitation?

The photographs unsettle. Muluneh’s visual voice is loud—marked by swaths of pronounced color, masked faces, floating eyes, and luscious chromatic backdrops—but crisp, without dissonance or vibrato. The effect is immediate and lasting, the iconography familiar enough to snap into an archetypal memory but fresh enough to demand a head tilt of curiosity.

To this temporary gallery, located in the dot of a transit map, a bus is coming. Or it’s going. And so are you. Locating Muluneh’s images in the flat box of the human holding pen lifts her work from photography to performance. Public art rarely strides so boldly into such truly public space. Muluneh’s project doesn’t climb atop a facade, project upon a multi-story wall, or dominate a public park. The human-sized, liminal arena of a bus stop is a metaphor for Muluneh’s experience of a refugee and immigrant, a life lived in movement—and not always of one’s choosing.

Of course, art in the age of mechanical reproduction ensures Muluneh is not in one place but many at one time, each installation instance linked by the standardized shape of a metro billboard. That her images replace adverts for mobile phones and perfume and tequila is an act of both delightful subversion and portal creation. One imagines each of her images tethered somehow to the next, opening like the magical doors of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, on the other side a fellow traveler.

If such displacement is her backdrop, place-making is her project. Evoked in each photograph is a sense of the fierce urgency of now. In the fragmented reality of war, famine, and migration, Muluneh is suggesting all one has is here and now. Look deeply, feel your feet on the ground. This is where you are.