ANDERU IMMACULATE MALI (IMMY MALI) B.1990
Seared Archive. Image courtesy the artist.
About:
“Her work also offers perspectives on human resilience and what can be overcome by representing pain as an emotion that can be touched”_Alex Lyons
Biography.
Born in 1990, Mali is a multi media artist living and working in Kampala Uganda. Her work revolves around personal narratives living in Uganda. She creates precarious installations in an attempt to digest the pain of childhood incidents and offer perspectives on human resilience and what can be overcome by representing pain as an emotion that can be touched.
In 2013, Mali graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Industrial and fine arts from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University. She then attended a residency at 32° East Ugandan Arts Trust where she created her first installation Daddy can I play?! . In 2014, she taught at workshops in Danish schools under the ‘Images Youth Programme’ with the Centre For Culture And Development (CKU), Denmark.
18 Musts Series.
She has participated in group exhibitions and festivals such as the Kampala Contemporary Arts Festival 2014, Kabbo Ka Muwala and workshops; AtWork Kampala Chapter with Lettera 27, KHOJ International artist’s workshop in Pune Maharashtra India, and the 5th ÀSÌKÒ CCA Lagos International Art Programme, Maputo Mozambique.
In 2016, she attended The Regional Visual arts Exchange Programme in Addis Ababa Ethiopia and participated as a residency artist in seven Hills, Kampala Biennial. Mali’s work is currently showing in the travelling exhibition, Kabbo Ka Muwala.
Daddy Can I Play, 2013 (detail).
Safe Here (2016) is a follow up to Daddy can I play (2013) in which Mali also addresses her childhood accident. She created a playground made out of materials which children can’t play with such as glass, razor blades and used hair braids. As the artist explains,“It’s also a reflection on parenting because parents sometimes protect their children too much.”
She is currently working on an art piece that addresses sexual harassment among children: “These painful situations are common in lots of communities. People know it happens and yet do nothing. The victims don’t dare to talk about it because they are ashamed and fear being stigmatized. Society sees it, but people keep quiet.”
Safe Here, 2016. Courtesy the artist & Gilbert Frank Daniels.
To address this complicit silence, Mali created the performance Seared Archive (2016), which she explains means stained or damaged archives. This work in progress consists of a performance (in the form of a video recording) of a white box in the middle of a white room, out of which blood is seeping. Every few minutes a different character sits on the box as the blood continues to drip down the sides and onto the floor; a priest, businesswoman, motorbike taxi driver, a soldier and a nanny sit down and stare blankly at the camera.
The blood symbolises the taboo pain and abuse in communities that nobody talks about; they just sit and let it happen. Mali used her own blood in order to intensify her message and confront herself with her own traumas: “People sit and look at the camera. They could choose to do something but decide not to. The box is made of paper, a material commonly used for archiving written records in Uganda, but which also represents the record kept of a living body. Hence the name ‘archive’. Blood stains the paper, as people’s lives are traumatized and stained by abusive incidents.”
Seared Archive (featuring Mali herself). Image courtesy the artist.
Virtually Mine, 2016.
In Virtually Mine (2016) Mali explores another facet of her life; migration and what it does to relationships. Since her boyfriend left Uganda for the United Arab Emirates two years ago, she has created an idea of his life based simply on their WhatsApp texts. Using flat strips of glass she built an installation in the shape of a male body and on the glass she glued screenshots of her WhatsApp conversations. These show their conversations about love, laughter, pain and fights and some of the screenshots are blank, referring to occasional bad internet connections. Thus their daily life is contained in glass; by using this material Mali shows the fragility of virtual relationships.
After the performance Mali says, “The process of making Seared archive was one I had never experienced before. It involved my presence in a very intimate and almost sacrificial way. I felt lots of conflicting emotions such as fear, uncertainty, relief, excitement and gratitude at the same moment.”