Overview
Some Are Born To Endless Night —Dark Matter marked Lina Iris Viktor’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, with more than 60 works on display in two galleries, many seen for the first time.
The artist'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. Presenting her singular artistic universe, the exhibition immersed visitors in deep lustres of black, punctuated with luminous 24-carat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues. To Viktor, black is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything.
Some Are Born To Endless Night —Dark Matter marked Lina Iris Viktor’s first major solo exhibition in the UK, with more than 60 works on display in two galleries, many seen for the first time. Brought together, they constitute a bold reclamation of creative agency, and historical and transcultural reimagining.
The artist'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 the artist, black is the proverbial materia prima: the source, the dark matter that birthed everything. Presenting Viktor’s singular artistic universe, the exhibition immersed visitors in deep lustres of black, punctuated with luminous 24-carat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues. Gold is both substance and symbol, a conduit to spiritual transcendence.
The Dark Continent series dominated the space: its solitary female figure in a monochromatic landscape illuminated by gilded solar and lunar symbols. The figure is the artist’s own form, her body shrouded in deep, matt black paint, her hair golden; at times contemplative and elusive, at other times provocative and alluring. These works represent an imaginary riposte to imperial narratives of empire and expansion, and the nineteenth-century myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’.
In the centre of the gallery, The Black Ark invited visitors to move through a site-specific installation of large-scale latticed panels of carved wood, an architectural structure inspired by the nets of Liberian fisherman and mashrabiyas. Exploring notions of ‘race’, history and ownership, the installation obscured some artworks while highlighting others, making them in the artist’s words ‘at once visible and obfuscated’. The darkened, tropical foliage of the Dark Continent series reappeared as sculptures (Black Botanica), liberated from the confines of the painted, still image.
Constellations IX foregrounds the artist’s interest in the coded languages of abstraction. In this elaborately gilded canvas, a maze of signs and intricate imagery alludes to subliminal, universal modes of communication beyond the restrictive boundaries of language, evoking more visceral forms of expression. In three variations of Materia Prima, the mother work that inspired the Dark Continent series, Viktor appears as a commanding pan-cultural deity, emanating an aura of power, authority and regality.
The second gallery was painted in deep ultramarine blue, emulating the ‘Blue Room’ in the artist’s studio. A meditative space within the gallery featured Syzygy, Viktor’s first figurative canvas reflecting the aesthetic vernacular the artist developed over the previous four years. Also on view were three works from A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. These works reinterpret the Libyan Sybil, a prophetess from antiquity invoked by eighteenth-century abolitionists as a mythical oracle who foresaw the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The series explores the extraordinary story of the founding of Liberia to examine fraught narratives of migration, colonialism and oppression.
