• Lina Iris Viktor's Constellations III marks the artist's auction début.
• Viktor has been garnering considerable praise since her début solo show at Gallery 151, New York, in 2014.
• Her first institutional exhibition in 2018-19 at the New Orleans Museum of Art was widely celebrated and covered by publications including The Art Newspaper and Dazed.
• In 2020, Viktor was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Fotografiska Museum of Photography, Stockholm, in addition to being included to a celebrated group show at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Good As Gold — Fashioning Senegalese Women.
• Viktor's work is collected by a number of prestigious institutions, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Washington D.C., the Hessel Museum of Art, the Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, the Crocker Museum of Fine Art, Sacramento, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, and Autograph, London.
Above Lina Iris Viktor at work on Constellations III
In this 2019 interview, Lina Iris Viktor walks the reader through her artistic process, her inspirations, and her desire to shed light on the infinite potential for beauty in the colour black.
Edwina Hagon: What ideas or themes do you explore through your practice?
Lina Iris Viktor: My work is about a lot of things. It’s partially about trying to make sense of a lot of the cosmologies and symbols and symbologies that have been part of our DNA as human beings, not even about myself as an African, but as human beings since the beginning of time. So, I look at a lot of ancient cultures like the Egyptians, the Nubians, different empires that existed across the content from the Congo to what is now Nigeria. I also look at the Dogon and Mali cultures and the symbologies of the Aboriginal people in Australia, a lot of South American, Native American cultures and how they depict their understanding of the world around them. These symbols are very universal; but for me, I want to create a visual language, or narrative, that unifies all these different symbols, and find a way to weave a visual tale that is not a literal language but that is felt far more intuitively.
I like to explore the ideas of universal implications of blackness, which has a trickle-down effect on the more sociological and racial ideas of blackness. When you think about the universe around us, it appears to be Black, it appears to be a void. Our modern society has always had very negative connotations associated with blackness, and I’m talking about that in the universal sense. So, when you look in Webster’s Dictionary, you see the associations and the synonyms attributed to blackness, and they’re all pretty negative. And so I almost want to create these works that are so visually stimulating—you can call them beautiful or aesthetically pleasing or attractive, but at least stimulating—so we can renegotiate these ideas around the universal implications of how we define blackness.
EH: Color plays a significant role in your practice, in particular blue, black, white, and 24-karat gold. Could you tell us about the motivation behind this purist color palette?
LIV: It was very intuitive. It wasn’t something I actively premeditated on. I’ve mentioned a lot already that I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetic language of cultures like the Egyptians and the Nubians, and if you look at the color palettes they use, it’s those colors: black and gold, and lapis—what people call Yves Klein Blue. To me, these colors signify power. And when we look back to that era and time and you see the artifacts remaining, what we see in museums—they’re wholly powerful, they stand the test of time, they’re immortal, and so I wanted to imbue the work with that energy.
Read more here.