Bampundu kumweshi

Mulenga Mulenga

My name is Mulenga J Mulenga female visual artists from Lusaka, Zambia where I live and work.
Through painting, sculpture, video, photography, installation and performance, I stitch together personal archive from the past with the present complexities of identity.

My work focuses on selfhood and origin by revisiting and reimagining old and new narratives that connect themes of gender, sexuality, spirituality and female ethnic discourse and historic the impacts provoked by humans and nature.


In the body of works titled, Bampundu kumweshi meaning “triplets are menstruating” the female body stands on site of the mining slag in protest over environmental scars.
It faces towards the active open mining activities across the road with no regards to surrounding narratives.
From the distance figures and earth moving equipment serves as monuments reminds of how complexes a place, space time and objects interact. The environmental scars are seen bleeding in bold day light and the land continues miscarrying.

The yellow, blue and red food coloring represents the cobalt/copper ore and magnesium which is mined in the area.
The display of menstrual blood (red color) in public is considered taboo but this is a protest against social norms and challenges the fact that the layers of slag is of land and bodies lost due to environmental impact of mining.

While standing on manmade mounds the body boldly confronts the social ideal of womanhood by rejecting the expected miniscule softness of imagined femininity by interacting with a polluted mining.

This part of kitwe town near the Black Mountain in the Copperbelt province of Zambia was once used by the mines to dump different mining waste and the land has turned blue from minerals, exposing any living creation (female body) to chemicals it has traces of copper oxide that is toxic if inhaled or if touched over long periods of time.