Selected Work

Alexandra Mawimbi — Visual Artist

The selected works presented here offer a window into a practice that moves fluidly across media, from dimensional sculptures to video, performance, sound, and installation. Each piece functions as an inquiry rather than a statement, inviting the viewer to sit with questions about representation, memory, and the body. The palette of deep burgundy and cream that frames this site echoes the emotional register of the work itself, which often dwells in spaces of mourning, living, and quiet endurance.

Central to this body of work is an ongoing engagement with the portrait as a living, breathing form rather than a fixed likeness. These portraits resist the temptation of simple documentation, instead treating the subject as a site of constant becoming. Whether rendered through sculpture, moving image, or sound, the figure is never fully captured, always slipping beyond the frame. This approach reflects a broader meditation on how identity is performed, witnessed, and remembered across cultural and geographic boundaries.

The artist's connections to Curaçao and to the broader African diaspora inform much of the conceptual terrain explored here. Across the selected pieces, there is a sustained attention to how histories travel, how they are carried in the body, and how they resurface in unexpected places. Sound and installation work in particular become vehicles for conjuring presence, allowing the absent and the ancestral to occupy the same room as the living viewer. The result is an intimate, layered experience of time and place.

Poetry and prayer thread quietly through several of these works, functioning less as literal text and more as tonal undercurrents that shape the atmosphere of each piece. The influence of the poem, the psalm, and the chant can be felt in the pacing of video work, the resonance of sound pieces, and the gestural quality of sculptural forms. These references are never decorative; they ground the work in traditions of address, invocation, and longing, giving each piece a gravity that lingers well beyond the initial encounter.

Taken together, this selection forms a coherent meditation on the derivative nature of image-making and the ethics of looking. The works ask what it means to represent another person, another culture, or another body, and what responsibilities accompany that act. With a minimal, text-forward presentation and unadorned thumbnails, the viewer is encouraged to slow down and meet each piece on its own terms. The result is an exhibition that feels both rigorously formal and deeply human.

A dimly lit gallery wall with framed artworks and a sculptural piece on a plinth, warm amber and deep burgundy tones, quiet and contemplative atmosphere

Portfolio by Medium


Alexandra Mawimbi's practice spans six media. Each category gathers selected works from across the artist's career.

Two-Dimensional Work

Drawings and works on paper exploring identity, memory, and the body.

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Sculptures

Three-dimensional pieces that extend the artist's inquiry into form and material.

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Video

Moving-image works including Mourning a Living Man (2013), Prison Sex II (2009), On Fait Ensemble (2010), Self Portrait (2011), Fertile (2011), and Is a Poem a Prayer (2018).

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Performance

Live works and documentation including Looking at Art; Looking at Africa; Looking at Art. (2009), Untitled derivative of Mshoga Mpya (2014), Is Free Dumb (2010), Dans Mon Brun (2009), and Untitled Series Curaçao (2010).

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Sound

Audio works — My Life (2018), I Saw Your Heart (2018), Winter Dreams (2018) — all featuring piano, vocals, and bass performed by Alex Mawimbi.

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Installation

Site-responsive works including The Armory Show (2016), Africa Untitled (2009), Representation (2014), and Four-Year-Old Temptress? (2017).

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