Emily Mulenga
2025-2026
Current Resident - Public ProgrammingImages: Emily Mulenga, The Time is Now, multiple dimensions, 2025.
Emily Mulenga is a 2025-2026 Current Resident, with her new piece, The Time is Now. With this commissions-based project, we typically insert black artists’ work into a “shared mail package” mailed to all residents of a single zip code. This year, we are inviting new media artists, digital artists, internet artists, and the like to create work that appears in digital ad spaces—embedding black art everywhere you look online.
Mulenga adapted the work in multiple formats—some folks may see it as a banner on a website they pull up, or a box embedded within the text they’re reading, and in many other places that adds are slyly incorporated into our daily scrolling.
Mulenga describes the work:
“With an aesthetic reminiscent of a mobile game or cartoon series, The Time Is Now touches on both playfulness and anxiety. A Cartoon Network-style version of the artist appears in a space helmet, visibly alarmed. Zeroed-out clock digits drift through the air, with time appearing either frozen, slipping away or even non-existent.
The phrase “The Time Is Now,” rendered in acid green and violet, could be motivational or menacing, the kind of message that flashes across screens, demanding an instant reaction. It also points to the urgency of taking necessary action towards all forms of justice. However, it could serve as a reminder that in our era of endless deadlines, goal-setting, and fears about the future, the most radical act might simply be to be here, now.”
If you come across Mulenga’s work while scrolling, take a screenshot and post it on Instagram—tag @blackembodiments and the artist and @emilymulenga!
Current ResidentAbout Current Resident
Current Resident is a public art project is inspired by the data collection and distribution processes of direct mail services used to solicit new customers—the "Current Resident" in-print mailers are typically addressed to.
The Black Embodiments Studio purchases ad space in the same glossy, colorful direct mail packets that residents already receive every week with the goal of generating unexpected moments of encounter with black artists and their works. In the process we aim to push the practice of “public art” and the idea that “art should be accessible” to their limits. What if we simply sent free black art to as many people as possible?
The 2025-2026 iteration of the project focuses on digital marketers, placing black art in online ad spaces to interrupt our daily scrolling in positive ways. What does it mean to intervene into devices and spaces that are typically used for work, for hyperconsumption, for doomscrolling, for escapism? What does it look and feel like to experience free black art during everyday scrolling?
About Emily Mulenga
Emily Mulenga (b.1991, UK) is a multimedia artist whose practice spans video, digital and physical media and music. Using visuals and sound that draw upon video games, cartoons and the internet, her practice explores themes of capitalism, feminism, technology, love, millennial nostalgia and existential anxieties. Gloss and escapism meet humour and unease, spanning past, present and future.
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