Emily Mulenga, Chelsea MA Fine Art graduate, wins Arts Foundation Futures award for Digital Art
- Written byNatalie Anastasiou
- Published date 06 April 2023
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The prestigious £10,000 Arts Foundation Fellowship for Digital Art was awarded to Emily Mulenga on 23 February at a ceremony in partnership with Leeds 2023: Year of Culture.
Emily graduated from Chelsea College of Arts with an MA Fine Art degree in 2020.
About The Arts Foundation
The Arts Foundation is a registered charity that supports individual artists and creatives in the UK with unconditional financial fellowships through the Arts Foundation Futures Awards.
Since 1993 the Arts Foundation has awarded over £1.8 million to the most promising artists in the UK at a pivotal moment in their careers to enable them to concentrate on their creative development, experiment, and realise their artistic potential.
The annual Arts Foundation Futures Awards, provides five £10,000 fellowships, with all shortlisted artists receiving £1,000 towards the development of their artistic practice. Each year the awards focus on broad and innovative art forms across Craft, Design, Film, Literature, Music, New Media, Performing Arts, and Visual Arts.
The Digital Art Award
The Digital Art Award focuses on artists engaging critically with technology and digital infrastructure and interrogating their impact on society. Birmingham-based Artist & Curator, Antonio Roberts presented the award and said:
“Emily Mulenga is an extraordinary artist whose practice exemplifies artists working digitally today. Her video work explores the many areas and complexities of digital identities, which she does playfully and with a deep knowledge of internet culture. I am excited to see how her practice evolves, particularly by embracing code and generative practices.”
Emily Mulenga is a multimedia artist whose practice spans video, digital collage, sculpture and live coded music. Using visuals and sound that draw upon video games, cartoons and the internet, her practice explores themes of capitalism, feminism, technology, millennial nostalgia, love and existential anxieties. Emily’s output reflects a ravenous consumption of digital media, where gloss and escapism meet humour and unease, spanning past, present and future. Emily has exhibited internationally and led projects at Tate Britain, Firstsite and Camden Art Centre. She holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts, funded by the Frank Bowling Scholarship. Emily says:
“I look into how the internet is used as a tool of expression, including ideas around agency both of the individual and of digital material, considering how the blurring between human and machine is changing experiences of womanhood.”
The independent jury members were Stephanie Hankey, Executive Director and Co-founder of Tactical Tech; Mark Leckey, Artist; and Antonio Roberts, Artist & Curator.
The Arts Foundation has a long history of supporting the visual arts, new media and film. Mary Jane Edwards, Director of The Arts Foundation says:
“Sustaining a visual arts practice while engaging critically and deeply in production with digital technology can be challenging, so we are really excited to support the development of Emily Mulenga’s complex practice, and the interdisciplinary shortlisted artists. All of whom are asking very important questions about identity and contemporary society, and experimenting with digital practices from AI, avatars, and augmented reality to gaming software.”
Read more about Digital Art Fellow, Emily Mulenga, and all the Shortlisted Artists: Uma Breakdown, GLOR1A and Nye Thompson on the Arts Foundation website.
To see more of Emily's work visit her website or Instagram page.
Find out more about MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts.