Ato Malinda | |
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 Malinda in 2019 | |
| Born | 1981 (age 42–43) |
| Other names | Alex Mawimbi |
| Education | The University of Texas at Austin, Transart Institute in New York |
| Occupation | Artist |
Ato Malinda, also known as Alex Mawimbi [1] is a multidisciplinary performance artist. [2]
In 1981 she was born in Kenya, as the daughter of a Kenyan mother and an Ugandan father. She grew up in the Netherlands, but returned to Kenya as a teenager. After high school she moved to the USA where she studied Art History and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas. She had a rough childhood of not being able to satisfy her father's desires of becoming a doctor, as well as dealing with the shame that came with being heterosexual in her community. In 2006 after moving to London for a little, her desire to pursue art was reawakened. [3] Ato Malinda was previously known as Alex Mawimbi. That former name more and more came to stand for the memory of her abusive father and family. After the recent death of her wife's mother-in-law, and as a therapeutic gesture, she decided to bear that name no longer. [4] Alex on the other hand is just as nice a name, she explains, and Mawimbi is the Swahili word for waves – a reference to the Indian Ocean that borders Kenya, the country on her ID. [5] She subsequently moved back to Kenya where she works in multiple art disciplines: video art, performance art, installation, drawing, and painting. In addition, she works as a free-lance curator. Ato is one of a few performance artists in East Africa and is fighting hard for this relatively unknown art discipline to become more accepted. Many of Ato's performances are transformed into video art, with new layers and perspectives added to the original performance [6]
She studied art history and molecular biology at the University of Texas, in hopes of becoming a doctor. [3] She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Transart Institute in New York. [7] Her work explores the facets of African identity and authenticity in mediums including performance, music, drawing and painting, installation, ceramics, and video. She focuses on gender and female sexuality, especially the stories of LGBTQ communities, and in the past has focused on the representation of African objects in Western museums. [7] At the 2010 SUD triennial in Douala, Cameroon, Malinda performed a piece on the myth of the water goddess Mami Wata in the mangroves of the Douala's Wouri River. [8] The performance, On fait ensemble, [9] was both observed and recorded. [8] In 2016, she was an awardee at the National Museum of African Art's inaugural African Art Awards [10] [11] and highlighted by The Wall Street Journal as an emerging artist. [12] Malinda is based in Rotterdam. [13] [7]
Ato Malinda has exhibited in numerous countries in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean and had residencies in Cameroon, Denmark, and Curaça. [6] The following are a few of her works highlighted:
Prison Sex II is a series of works that began with a community mural evolved in to a public performance and then became a video triptych. The mural was painted during Urban Wasanii 2008; a Triangle Arts Trust workshop in Mombasa, Kenya. The image was of a leso, a piece of cloth that came from the suture of handkerchiefs worn by Portuguese merchants in the 16th century. The local women on the Kenyan coast traded with the merchants and sewed the handkerchiefs into cloths they could wrap around their bodies. These cloths evolved to become the lesos that we know today in East Africa. The mural's message was to “know your history, but own your culture.” This made reference to the history of the textile that so many people believe is indigenous to East Africa when in fact it represents a history of hybridism. The public performance of Prison Sex II was inside the Fort Jesus museum and devoted to the memory of a woman who was imprisoned there during colonial rule when the museum was a prison, as means to gain autonomy from her husband. The central video of the triptych talks about this woman as well as a female Kenyan freedom fighter named Me Kitilili. Me Kitilili was also imprisoned at the fort because she fought British colonists who wanted to cut down sacred forests on the Kenyan coastline. [14]
The video is about Mami Wata, an ancient African water spirit, who has been worshipped by Africans before the arrival of Europeans but came into recorded history in the 15th Century. It was recorded that at the sight of European ships, Africans associated water spirits with the Europeans. During colonialism, in the 1880s a famous German hunter, Breitwiser, brought back a wife from Southeast Asia to Germany. Breitwiser's wife performed in Hamburg's volkerschau, essentially human zoos, under the stage name “Maladamatjaute”. She charmed snakes. The Frienlaender lithographic company, in Hamburg, made a chromolithograph of the snake charmer, the original of which has never been found. However in 1955, this image was reprinted in Bombay, India, sent to them from Ghana. It is unknown how exactly the image got to West Africa, but it is thought to have been taken from Hamburg by African sailors when they were in Germany. However on its arrival in Africa, locals declared Maladamatjaute to be a resemblance to Mami Wata. The image has since proliferated throughout the African continent as Mami Wata, the snake charmer. On Fait Ensemble suggests in a metaphorical sense, that this image came from Europeans. This is done through the market performance of Papai Wata. Papai Wata, the concomitant to Mami Wata in Beninese traditional ceremonies, symbolizes the European man and is depicted in the video by a white painted face. [14]
The two-channel video shows two performers toggling between roles—father, wife, adult lesbian, child—to paint a picture of dysfunctional domesticity, tainted by miscommunication, incest, and adultery. [14]
A response to the outlawing of homosexuality in Kenya. This is highly intimate on two levels. First, the performance can be experienced by only one person at a time. The single audience member comes face-to-face with the artist in an enclosed cubicle. Second, during the performance itself, Malinda becomes a vessel through which lived experiences of LGBT individuals are encountered by the one-person audience. The stories were collected by the artist in Nairobi. She accosts this silence by performing her gathered conversations while concurrently preserving the privacy of the individual life stories through the small performance space. Half of Malinda's face is painted with the rainbow flag associated with the LGBT community. She wears gender neutral clothing and a small afro wig to convey androgyny. This suggests that the performance is not so much about gender as it is about the life stories of LGBT individuals being shared. [15]
These are just a few of her works, she utilizes many different mediums such as music, drawing and painting, installation and ceramics.
A recurrent theme in many of Ato's art works is identity: female identity, black identity, African identity, cultural identity. She has, among other things, examined “africanity”, female stereotyping, women's role and social status in Kenya, but also the influence of architecture on the formation of identity. [6] Like Ato before, Alex dwells in the realm of African Art. That is to say, we know that there are artists who are ‘from Africa’. There is also a vast infrastructure of institutions that specialize in ‘African Art’. And more often than not, artists from Africa are condemned to dwell within that infrastructure, because it gives opportunities. But epistemically speaking, African Art is a highly undefined and unspecified term. As already convincingly argued by the Congolese-U.S. scholar Valentin-Yves Mudimbe decades ago, the idea of an African culture is a Eurocentric concept haunted by colonial thought. It is carried on in museums that ‘do’ African art even though their presence beholds qualities of synecdoche – objects become representational for the culture of a continent. [5]
The following are publications that note the artist as well give an intellectual perspective on her art.
Mami Wata is a water spirit venerated in West, Central, and Southern Africa and in the Afro-American diaspora. Mami Wata spirits are usually female but are sometimes male.
Amelia Jones, originally from Durham, North Carolina, is an American art historian, art theorist, art critic, author, professor and curator. Her research specialisms include feminist art, body art, performance art, video art, identity politics, and New York Dada. Jones's earliest work established her as a feminist scholar and curator, including through a pioneering exhibition and publication concerning the art of Judy Chicago; later, she broadened her focus on other social activist topics including race, class and identity politics. Jones has contributed significantly to the study of art and performance as a teacher, researcher, and activist.
Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work. Born in Kenya, she has lived and established her career in New York City for more than twenty years. Mutu's work has directed the female body as subject through collage painting, immersive installation, and live and video performance while exploring questions of self-image, gender constructs, cultural trauma, and environmental destruction and notions of beauty and power.
Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.
Sonya Clark is an American artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Clark is a fiber artist known for using a variety of materials including human hair and combs to address race, culture, class, and history. Her beaded headdress assemblages and braided wig series of the late 1990s, which received critical acclaim, evoked African traditions of personal adornment and moved these common forms into the realm of personal and political expression. Although African art and her Caribbean background are important influences, Clark also builds on practices of assemblage and accumulation used by artists such as Betye Saar and David Hammons.
Caribbean art refers to the visual as well as plastic arts originating from the islands of the Caribbean. Art in the Caribbean reflects thousands of years of habitation by Arawak, Kalinago, and other people of the Caribbean followed by waves of immigration, which included artists of European origins and subsequently by artists with heritage from countries all around the world. The nature of Caribbean art reflects these diverse origins, as artists have taken their traditions and adapted these influences to reflect the reality of their lives in the Caribbean.
Sutapa Biswas is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media.
Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.
Ingrid Mwangi is a German artist, of Kenyan-German descent. She works with photography, sculpture and in multimedia, performance, and installation art. In 2005, she co-founded Mwangi Hutter.
Dominique "Kouas" Gnonnou is a contemporary Beninese artist and sculptor of Vodun art.
Joseph Kossivi Ahiator is an African politician and Ghanaian artist known for his temple mural paintings in Bénin, Ghana, and Togo. He is a member of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and a former Member of Parliament for the Ketu South Constituency in the Volta Region of Ghana.
Syowia Kyambi is a multimedia and interdisciplinary artist and curator whose work spans photography, video, drawing, sound, sculpture, and performance installation. She is of Kenyan and German descent, based in Nairobi, Kenya. She is known for her "performative installations that recast historical (Western) narratives and intervene in spheres of colonial activities" with work reputed for tackling "complex and sometimes difficult or tabooed matters" that afford "multiple points of entry, grounded in a sense of place and history while recognizing the mutability of those concepts." Through focusing on historical past, she also draws the audience's attention to daily life through her artwork.
Kenya (Robinson) (born 1977) is an American multimedia artist whose work includes performance, sculpture and installation. Raised in Gainesville, Florida, (Robinson)'s work depicts themes of privilege and consumerism, exploring perceptions of gender, race and ability. Combining a variety of audio-visual elements and live performance, (Robinson)'s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and the 60 Wall Street Gallery of Deutsche Bank. She has lectured at Hampshire College, Long Island University, and the University of Florida.
Michael Paul Britto is a New York contemporary artist who explores the consequences of racial inequality through photography, video, collage, sculpture and performance. Britto shines a light on important racial issues using contemporary art. His work has been exhibited predominantly in New York, but also internationally, with exhibitions in Spain, Poland, and England. In 2004, he won the Individual Artist grant from New York State Council of The Arts, and in 2005, he was awarded the Media Arts Fellowship Grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, installation, and performance. Perry's work investigates "blackness, black femininity, African American heritage" and the portrayal or representation of black people throughout history, focusing on how blackness influences technology and image making. Perry explores the duality of intelligence and seductiveness in the contexts of black family heritage, black history, and black femininity. "Perry is committed to net neutrality and ideas of collective production and action, using open source software to edit her work and leasing it digitally for use in galleries and classrooms, while also making all her videos available for free online. This principle of open access in Perry's practice aims to privilege black life, to democratize access to art and culture, and to offer a critical platform that differentiates itself from the portrayal of blackness in the media". For Perry, blackness is a technology which creates fissures in systems of surveillance and control and thus creates inefficiency as an opportunity for resistance.
Eve Sandler is an American painter, filmmaker and multi-media artist in the style of Abstract Expressionism. Sandler, born in Harlem, is the daughter of Harlem-based painter Alvin Sandler and sister of filmmaker Kathe Sandler.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum is a visual artist. Her practice includes drawing, painting, installation, and animation. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including the GTA21 Triennial Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, Canada; The Bronx Museum in New York, USA; The Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, Belgium; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Kunsthaus Zürich, Germany; The Showroom in London, England; and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with. Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas. As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.
Senzeni Marasela is a South African visual artist born in Thokoza who works across different media, combining performance, photography, video, prints, textiles, and embroidery in mixed-medium installations. She obtained a BA in Fine Arts at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1998. Her work is exhibited in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. It is part of local and international collections, including Museum of Modern Art or the Newark Museum, and is referenced in numerous academic papers, theses journals, and book publications.
Lebohang Kganye is a South African visual artist living and working in Johannesburg. Kganye is part of a new generation of contemporary South African artists and photographers born shortly before or after Apartheid ended.
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