Our Artists

Mulenga J Mulenga

Mulenga J Mulenga is an award-winning Zambian contemporary artist whose expressive figurative paintings explore the intimate and universal experiences of identity, womanhood, motherhood, memory, and resilience.

Rooted in her Bemba heritage and shaped by personal experience, Mulenga's practice transforms moments of everyday life into deeply personal visual narratives. Her figures often carry a quiet strength, inviting reflection on the complexities of womanhood, family, memory, and belonging. Through colour, gesture, and expressive mark-making, she creates works that are at once deeply rooted in place and resonant across cultures.

Mulenga studied Art & Design and Fine Arts & Education at Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts and has continued to expand her practice through international training in Austria, China, England, and at Asiko Art School (CCA Lagos). Her artistic development has also been shaped by residencies in London and Zambia.

Her work has been exhibited extensively across Africa and internationally, including in Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, and the United States. Her exhibitions have taken place in New York, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Israel, Seychelles, Peru, Finland and Zambia. In 2021, she presented her acclaimed solo exhibition Bana Subilo at Mwimbi Gallery in Lusaka.

A three-time national award recipient, Mulenga was named Most Outstanding Female Visual Artist at the Zambia National Ngoma Awards in 2019 and 2022, and received the Visual Arts Council Award in 2020. In 2017, she was a Top 5 Finalist at the 7th Biennale of Contemporary Art in Seychelles.

Beyond the studio, Mulenga is committed to the transformative potential of art. Her work as an educator and women's rights advocate extends into initiatives that use art and creative education to empower women and children and create opportunities within vulnerable communities. Through her collaboration with Luna Art Studio, she continues to explore the role of art not only as a form of expression, but as a catalyst for connection, empowerment, and social change.

Mulenga Chafilwa

Born in Lusaka, Mulenga Chafilwa is one of Zambia's prominent contemporary painters. His work captures the pulse of urban life through bustling markets, transport hubs, streets, and public gatherings. Working in acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and ink, he combines figurative imagery with an expressive, abstract density.

Describing himself as a "street recorder," Chafilwa observes the behaviours, rituals, and humour of everyday life. His faceless figures, often stripped of individual identity, become universal representations of collective human experience. Through caricature and wit, his paintings invite us to laugh, while also encouraging reflection on our own place within society.

Since the 1990s, Chafilwa has balanced his artistic practice with teaching, mentorship, and cultural leadership. Through initiatives including workshops at Kasisi Home and the Henry Tayali Centre, and the founding of August Studios, he has contributed to the development of Zambia's emerging creative community, playing an important role in nurturing artistic communities and supporting the next generation of practitioners.

His career encompasses international residencies, commissions, and significant leadership within Zambia's visual arts sector. He has chaired the Zambia National Visual Arts Council and served on the advisory board of the Lechwe Trust.

Chafilwa's work is ultimately an exploration of people, place, and collective experience. His crowded, faceless figures become mirrors through which we encounter fragments of ourselves. In Chafilwa's hands, the ordinary becomes significant — the street becomes both subject and stage: a place of observation, humour, encounter, and reflection.

Nukwase Tembo

Nukwase Tembo is a Zambian visual artist with 11 years of professional practice. Working primarily in oil paint and mixed media, she creates surreal figurative works that explore identity, belonging, transformation, and the complex relationship between the individual and culture.

Her practice is deeply informed by her experience as an African woman and by her interest in the social structures that shape women's lives. She uses art as a form of advocacy, challenging societal norms that marginalise women and questioning the expectations placed on women's bodies, identities, and choices. Her work has addressed themes of women's autonomy, violence and oppression, beauty standards, and the ways cultural and social systems can limit women's agency.

Nukwase's commitment to women's rights extends beyond the canvas, with her creative practice engaging wider conversations around gender equality, women's empowerment, and social change. Her 2019 solo exhibition, The Gatekeepers of Morality, examined the unrealistic standards placed on African women in the name of culture and tradition.

Her paintings often use the female figure and chitenge as powerful symbols of inherited identity and cultural memory. Through surreal transformations of the body, she explores the tension between who society teaches us to be and who we consciously choose to become.

At the heart of Nukwase's practice is the belief that personal transformation can contribute to cultural transformation. Her work invites audiences to question inherited ideas, confront uncomfortable realities, and imagine more empowered and inclusive ways of being.

Mwamba Mulangala

Mwamba Mulangala is a prominent Zambian contemporary visual artist whose practice explores the complex relationships between individuals, society, and the structures that shape contemporary life. In the late 1990s, he became the youngest recipient of the Henry Tayali Award for Best Two-Dimensional Artist in Zambia, awarded by the National Arts Council of Zambia.

Mwamba's work engages with questions of human rights, social responsibility, equality, peace, conflict, and political power. Working across painting, mixed media, and assemblage, he combines conventional art materials with found and repurposed objects, transforming elements from his environment into evocative and symbolically charged compositions. His practice also draws at times from dream imagery, allowing personal memory, subconscious experience, and social realities to converge.

Over the course of his career, Mwamba has built an increasingly international profile, attracting the interest and patronage of collectors, cultural institutions, and art enthusiasts across Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

His work has been exhibited extensively in Zambia, across Africa, and internationally, including at the Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Senegal, as well as exhibitions in South Africa, Namibia, France, Germany, Peru, the United States, and the United Kingdom. His international solo exhibitions include Kumwesu (A Place Where One Comes From) at the Dubuque Museum of Art, Iowa, and Unplugged at Bag Factory, Johannesburg.

Mwamba has participated in international artist residencies in South Africa, Spain, and Peru. He holds an Art Teachers' Diploma, Bachelor of Fine Arts, and Master of Fine Arts, and currently lives and works in Zambia.