Autograph presents the first major solo exhibition by British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor. Entitled Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter, this exhibition is an immersion in deep lustres of black punctuated with luminous 24-karat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues in Lina Iris Viktor’s singular artistic universe.
Viktor’s photography, painting and sculptural installations are infused with cultural histories of the global African diaspora and preoccupied with multifaceted notions of blackness: as colour, as material and as socio-political consciousness. To Viktor, black is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything.
Lina Iris Viktor lives and works itinerantly between New York and London. Raised in London to Liberian parents, she travelled extensively in her youth, and also lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for several years. Viktor’s multifaceted practice is informed by a background in theatre and film at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and her continued studies in photography and design at The School of Visual Arts, along with an education in performance arts during high school. Working with a restricted colour palette, her artworks are a blend of photography, performance and abstract painting, along with the ancient practice of gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with ‘layers of light’.
Selected solo exhibitions include A Heaven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, NOMA, New Orleans (2018); The Black Ark, The Armory Show, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, New York (2018); Black Exodus: Act 1 – Materia Prima, Amar Gallery, London (2017); Arcadia, Gallery 151, New York (2014).
A hardcover artist monograph will accompany the exhibition, edited by curator Renée Mussai with texts by Emmanuel Iduma, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Christina Sharpe, and an in-depth conversation between Lina Iris Viktor and Renée Mussai. The monograph is published by Autograph with kind support of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago.
Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter
13 Sept 2019- 25 Jan 2020
Autograph
Rivington Place
London EC2A 3BA
www.autograph.org.uk
Image source: Autograph
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