Ato Malinda

Biography

In 2014, in Nairobi, viewers were led one at a time into an enclosed booth where the artist was waiting, half her face painted in the colours of the rainbow flag. She wore gender-neutral clothing and a small afro wig. She retold conversations she had recorded with gay men, lesbians and other members of the LGBT community in Kenya. The work was called “Mshoga Mpya” (“The New Homosexual”) and was a response to the criminal ban on same-sex relations in Kenya.

It is one of Ato Malinda’s best-known works.

She was born in 1981 in Kenya, to a Kenyan mother and a Ugandan father. She spent her first years in the Netherlands and returned to Kenya as a teenager. After school she moved to the United States and studied art history and molecular biology at the University of Texas at Austin (by some accounts in 2000–2003); her father wanted her to become a doctor. The wish to make art came back to her in 2006, after a short stay in London. Later she received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Transart Institute in New York. She has lived and worked in the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Kenya, and has taught and worked as a curator. She was born with a Ugandan name and took Ato Malinda as an artistic persona. For a short time she used the name Alex Mawimbi, but she went back to the earlier one.

She began as a painter and then moved to performance, video, music, ceramics and installation. She often turned her performances into video works, adding new layers to the original action. There are few performance artists in East Africa, and she has worked steadily to win acceptance for the practice. Her main themes are African identity and its “authenticity”, gender, female sexuality and the lives of LGBT communities. Earlier she also looked at how African objects are displayed in Western museums.

“Prison Sex II” (2009) grew out of a community mural made in 2008 at a Triangle Arts Trust workshop in Mombasa. The wall showed a leso, a piece of cloth said to have originated in the stitched-together handkerchiefs of sixteenth-century Portuguese merchants; local women traded with the merchants and sewed the handkerchiefs into wraps. The mural’s motto was “Know your history, but own your culture.” A public performance followed inside Fort Jesus in Mombasa, a museum that was once a prison, and then a video triptych. It tells of a woman who was held in the prison during colonial rule as a way to gain freedom from her husband, and of the Kenyan resistance leader Me Kitilili, who was also imprisoned in the fort for fighting British colonists who wanted to cut down sacred forests.

In 2010, at the Salon Urbain de Douala (SUD) triennial in Cameroon, she staged a performance, “On fait ensemble”, in the mangroves of the Wouri River, about the water spirit Mami Wata. In her account, the popular image of the snake charmer goes back to a chromolithograph made in Hamburg after the performances of a woman in so-called “human zoos”. The picture then reached Africa and was declared there to be an image of Mami Wata. Mami Wata’s counterpart, Papai Wata, who symbolizes the European man, is played in the video by a person with a white-painted face. The two-channel video “Mourning a Living Man” (2013) shows two performers shifting between roles: father, wife, adult lesbian, child. Together they paint a picture of a dysfunctional household marked by incest, adultery and an inability to talk to one another.

Her work has been shown in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. Among her exhibitions and events: the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin and ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (2011), the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Dakar Biennale (2014), events at the National Museum of African Art (2015 and 2016), the Iwalewahaus in Bayreuth and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (2015), and the Brooklyn Museum (2016). She held residencies in Cameroon, Denmark and Curaçao. In 2012 she received the One Minutes Award, in 2015 a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and in 2016 she was one of the awardees at the museum’s inaugural African Art Awards; The Wall Street Journal wrote about her that year.

To my mind, the most interesting thing about Malinda is that she herself questions the frame of “African art” in which her work most often ends up. She now lives between Rotterdam and Kenya.