Ato Malinda

Ato Malinda, also known as Alex Mawimbi is a multidisciplinary performance artist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

She studied art history and molecular biology at the University of Texas, in hopes of becoming a doctor.

She received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Transart Institute in New York.

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.

The mural was painted during Urban Wasanii 2008; a Triangle Arts Trust workshop in Mombasa, Kenya.

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.

The performance, On fait ensemble, was both observed and recorded.

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.

In 2016, she was an awardee at the National Museum of African Art's inaugural African Art Awards and highlighted by The Wall Street Journal as an emerging artist.

Malinda is based in Rotterdam.

Ato Malinda has exhibited in numerous countries in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean and had residencies in Cameroon, Denmark, and Curaça.

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 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.