Ato Malinda
Residency period
18 August – 15 October 2016
About
Ato Malinda (Kenya/The Netherlands) lives and works in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She has a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from Transart Institute, New York. Her diverse practice consists of performance, drawing, painting, installation, video, and ceramic object-making, through which she investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity and issues of colonialism, trade, race, gender and sexuality.
Malinda was recently the winner of the first Annual African Art Award from the Smithsonian Institution (2016) and was one of the awardees of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2015). She has exhibited extensively participating in exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Denmark (2015) and the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2014) among others.
Focus
While in Residence, Malinda will investigate Singapore’s history as a trading port, following the discovery of the Belitung shipwreck in 1998, 600 miles off the coast of Singapore that signifies the exchange of goods, ideas and cultures in the 9th century. She will work with Singaporean women to develop a collection of ceramic objects that will then enter the art market, highlighting notions of hybridity in cultural studies as well as the route of globalisation today that has existed in the region for more than a thousand years.