After high school she moved to the USA where she studied Art History and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas.

[4] 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.

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.

[7] Her work explores the facets of African identity and authenticity in mediums including performance, music, drawing and painting, installation, ceramics, and video.

[13][7] Ato Malinda has exhibited in numerous countries in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean and had residencies in Cameroon, Denmark, and Curaça.

The local women on the Kenyan coast traded with the merchants and sewed the handkerchiefs into cloths they could wrap around their bodies.

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.

Breitwiser's wife performed in Hamburg's volkerschau, essentially human zoos, under the stage name “Maladamatjaute”.

[14] The two-channel video shows two performers toggling between roles—father, wife, adult lesbian, child—to paint a picture of dysfunctional domesticity, tainted by miscommunication, incest, and adultery.

She has, among other things, examined “africanity”, female stereotyping, women's role and social status in Kenya, but also the influence of architecture on the formation of identity.

As already convincingly argued by the Congolese-U.S. scholar Valentin-Yves Mudimbe decades ago, the idea of an African culture is a Eurocentric concept haunted by colonial thought.

It is carried on in museums that ‘do’ African art even though their presence beholds qualities of synecdoche – objects become representational for the culture of a continent.