HOME presents Bernice Mulenga’s debut solo exhibition; Between Me and You, depicting joyous moments captured on film. Mulenga notes: “As a teenager, I wasn’t documented”. The large-scale photographic images from their series #friendsonfilm, are part of Bernice’s ongoing documentation of their life and the community around them.

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While primarily presenting members of the Black Queer community, the images hint at the underlying issues of the Black British experience. Mulenga’s focus has been predominantly capturing moments, using differing images to reinforce the notion of connection. With the knowledge that memories situate us, help us to navigate our lives more fully thereby engaging in our life experience, Bernice’s pictorial account affords us a way to help deepen the experience. This archival journey, which Bernice began in 2015, is seen as akin to coming of age, growing with time. 

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The body of work is underpinned by its colour and brightness, highlighting the happiness that is being portrayed and communicated to the viewer. The intention is to situate the viewer ‘within’ the images, allowing them to be a part of the images, adding to the atmosphere, the space, looking with the eye and above all documenting the immediate experience pictorially. The viewer becomes part of the “candid nature” of the photographs, as an invitation to life’s private moments, infusing them with energy. 

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Alongside the photographs from #friendsonfilm, is a series of intimate self portraits captured between 2019 and 2021, during moments of introspect and exploration of personal intimacy, being together with oneself and the importance of self-documentation. Continuing themes opened through HOME’s 2021 exhibition ‘The Self Portrait’, further developed through Mulenga’s non-binary perspective, the show explores the outward expression of freedom alongside the personal. 

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Holding in mind Maya Angelou’s saying that “people forget what you say, and what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel”, Mulenga invites you to partake in Between Me and You: an intimate archive of Queer, Black British feeling.