Immy Mali: Dressing Chamber

November 7-29, 2018
Opening Reception: November 9, 7-9pm
The gallery will be closed Nov. 21-24.

Immy Mali presents Dressing Chamber, an installation at Open Source Gallery.

Since early 2017, Ugandan artist Immy Mali has written letters addressed to “Marcue,” the name she was called as a child, as part of her ongoing series Letters to My Childhood. Through her letters to her younger self, Mali reconstructs and reassembles her memories to explore her childhood. In Dressing Chamber, which is a part of this series, the audience is invited to listen in on Mali’s letters to herself as she sifts through personal recollections, as well as investigates the inevitable fictions that are created in the process of recounting memories. Contrasting a space that is typically private, the dressing room, with the ones she knew as a child, (communal spaces in shared bedrooms at home and in boarding school), Dressing Chamber plays with the notions of public and private space, both figuratively and literally, by creating an intimate dressing chamber.

Dressing Chamber creates an immersive space, both intimate and public, for a conceptual reenactment of Mali’s memories as she reckons with factors that have shaped her life–from languages, customs, and traditions at home to her experiences under a colonial educational system. Using the mirror as a place to unveil one’s own vulnerabilities and simultaneously practice concealing them, Mali creates an installation where the audience is invited to sit in her confessional as she relays her memories.

Independent curator and writer Moses Serubiri writes about Letters to My Childhood: “Through this process of writing back to a younger self, Marcue, Mali unveils certain entanglements between language and cultural hegemony. In one of the letters to Marcue, Mali starts to retell a story in English only to later incorporate elements of another story in Lugbara, her mother tongue. While, this, according to the artist, reveals the open-ended form of oral storytelling in Lugbara, it is through this letter writing practice that she has become aware of the overt conditioning of English education and literacy. As traces of violent pedagogical acts emerge, it becomes clearer that one of the artist’s aims is to carry out a form of repatriation of both language and traditional knowledge.”

Immy Mali is a multimedia artist living and working in Kampala, Uganda. Mali received her BFA in Industrial and Fine Arts from the Makerere University. Mali is currently in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten Amsterdam Netherlands. She has previously been an artist in residence at Rhodes University South Africa artist residency, the East African Regional Exchange Residency Program, 32° East Ugandan Arts Trust,KHOJ International Workshop Pune Maharashtra India among others. Mali’s work has been featured at CBK Centrum Beeldende Kunst (Netherlands), Africa Culture & Design Festival (Nigeria), Galeria do Banco Economico (Angola), Dakar Biennial (Senegal), 2nd Kampala Biennial 2016(Uganda), Städtische Galerie Bremen (Germany) and Circle Arts Agency (Kenya) among others.

Immy Mali: Dressing Chamber | Press Release | Installation View | Text by Moses Serubiri