Text by Moses Serubiri
Immy Mali: Dressing Chamber | Press Release | Installation View | Text by Moses Serubiri
Immy Mali Exhibition Text
By Moses Serubiri
Anderu Immaculate Mali (b. 1990) through writing letters, making videos and conceptual sculpture, engages childhood memory and collective history. At the meeting of personal and collective experiences, Mali traverses uneasy entanglements by reconstructing seemingly fractured or unresolved personal and historical memory. Mali’s conceptual sculpture, Virtually Mine (2016) consists of rectangular glass plates, that mimic the surface of the artist’s Sony Xperia mobile phone. Suspended in mid-air from a metallic grid attached to the ceiling, each glass plate forms a part of an abstract male human figure.
Though conceptual, the installation is closely connected to Mali’s own biographical story. Love notes and everyday conversations printed on the glass plates mirror real-life correspondence between the artist and her fiancé working overseas over the period of a year. Entangled within the exhibitionary rectangular forms, the artist’s and her lover’s voices echo through the back and forth between virtual and real interfaces.
Mali’s translations of biographical stories in letter writing, video or conceptual sculpture transgress the boundaries between private and public; personal and collective records. In her installation, Daddy Can I Play? (2013), the artist draws on similar themes of childhood memory, by constructing an imagined playground made of swings and slides that her protective family would not approve of. In the work, installed inside a stone quarry located in Muyenga, Kampala, the swings are made of human hair extensions woven into ropes with matching seats in-laid with sharp broken glass, and a trampoline made of bottle-caps. Emotional and social entanglements erupt, about the role of parents or guardians; the structure of, and access to, public space; her own incomplete memories and the official history of towns and cities.
The artist’s practice of letter writing has emerged from a desire to undo such complex entanglements through memory inquiries and reconstructions. Since early 2017, Mali has addressed her letters to Marcue – the name she was addressed in her childhood. The letters seem to involve broad questions such as: the importance of home; polyglot experiences in a British education system; song, rhyme, and oral storytelling traditions; names and naming; the articulation of events in American slavery; British imperial history in song, among others.
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. “In the process of appropriating childhood experiences, in the letters, I encounter stories, songs, folk tales in the traditional languages that I wish I could properly express in that traditional language,” she says. This act of reenactment in conceptual forms, as a gesture of reconstructing memory, is at the core of Mali’s recent practice.
