Lina Iris Viktor

In The black Fantastic

Hayward Gallery | London | Kunsthal Rotterdam | Netherlands

June 29th 2022 — September 18th 2022 | November 19, 2022 — April 9, 2023

Myth, science fiction, spiritual traditions and the legacy of Afrofuturism are all sampled, reimagined and recontextualised in In the Black Fantastic. Encompassing painting, photography, video, sculpture and mixed-media installations, the exhibition creates immersive aesthetic experiences that bring the viewer into a new environment somewhere between the real world and a multiplicity of imagined ones.

While some artists disrupt our understanding of the past, others invite us to imagine fantastical futures. In this exhibition, fantasy becomes a zone of creative and cultural liberation and a means of addressing racism and social injustice by conjuring new ways of being in the world.

In the Black Fantastic is curated by Ekow Eshun and features the artists Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Rashaad Newsome, Chris Ofili, Tabita Rezaire, Cauleen Smith, Lina Iris Viktor and Kara Walker.

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Rite of Passage

LGDR | London

June 30th 2022 — October 29th 2022

Rite of Passage: Lina Iris Viktor with César, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, and Yves Klein is a presentation of works by Lina Iris Viktor and historic artists whose work finds echoes in her practice. Revealing connections across colour, process, and material, this dialogue complements Viktor’s recent shift toward a more intuitive, abstract, and visceral mode of expression. Rite of Passage demonstrates this turn in the artist’s practice, debuting a new work that Viktor created for the presentation at LGDR. A selection of the artist’s recent paintings and sculptures are concurrently on view in the exhibition In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London.

While calling on the past, Rite of Passage foregrounds Viktor’s reflection on our current moment as “mercurial.” Meditating upon how our global society contends with mortality, she uses gold to create a malleable topography, challenging the notion of the metal’s perceived permanence. “Rite of Passage,” a title chosen by Viktor, is linked to the Roman deity Mercury (from whose name the word “mercurial” is derived) and his Greek counterpart, the messenger Hermes. The god’s role as a psychopomp—a being that travels between mortal and divine realms to escort souls to the afterlife—is analogous to how gold serves as a conduit in Viktor’s work, actualizing a ritualized passage from one state to another.

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Triumvirate: Constellations I, IV, IX

North Carolina Museum of Art | Raleigh, North Carolina

September 9th 2020 — April 19th 2021

Solo installation is an extension of the exhibition: “Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women”.

“Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women” is the first major exhibition of Senegalese gold jewelry to date that focuses on the history of Senegal’s gold, from past to present, and the beauty and complexity of the way Senegalese women use ornament and fashion to present themselves. A key theme of the exhibition is the Senegalese concept of sañse (a Wolof word for dressing up or looking and feeling good). “Good as Gold” explores how a woman in a city like Dakar might use a piece of gold jewelry to build a carefully tailored, elegant fashion ensemble.

“Good as Gold: Fashioning Senegalese Women” is organized by Kevin D. Dumouchelle of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. It is curated by Amanda Maples of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Radical Love

Ford Foundation | New York, New York

June 11th 2019 — August 27th 2019

Through the theme of “Utopian Imagination'“, the trilogy of exhibitions in the gallery's inaugural year create a trajectory toward a more just future. The first exhibition, “Perilous Bodies” (March 4 - May 11, 2019), examined injustice through the intersecting lens of violence, race, gender, ethnicity, and class. “Radical Love” responds to the first show by offering love as the answer to a world in peril.

Love, in the context of this exhibition, is defined by a commitment to the spiritual growth and interconnectedness of the individual, their community, and stewardship of the planet. Guided by the powerful words of bell hooks, “Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.” The works in “Radical Love” are grounded in ideas of devotion, abundance, and beauty; here, otherness and marginality is celebrated, adorned, and revered.

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Re-Significations: The Black Mediterranean

Zisa Zona Arti Contemporanee (ZAC) | Manifesta 12 Biennial, City of Palermo

June 6th 2018 — November 4th 2018

Re-Significations exhibition will continue onto Palermo, Italy for the 12th edition of the Manifesta European Contemporary Art Biennial, as a continuation of the Re-Significations exhibit that was launched and exhibited at 3 different venues in Florence, Italy in 2015. "Re-Significations: The Black Mediterranean" extends the curatorial narrative by staging works in which African and African Diasporic conventions of art making inscribe such histories and subjectivities through their subjects and styles. Like its sister exhibition, Re-Significations will display the innovative ways with which artists translate, extend and project traditions of making art to inscribe black subjects and contexts in world history. From geometrical to painterly and sculptural, musical and photographic traditions and their re-inventions, the exhibition illustrates how the dialogical display across time and space reflect visual and performing arts and how they produce archives, texts and artistic methods of the black world. 

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The Woven Arc

The Cooper Gallery | Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 

May 20th 2016 — July 16th 2016

The Woven Arc explores the visual dialogues between an unusual selection of artworks not usually posed in conversation with each other: figurative and abstract sculptures, paintings, prints, and textiles, along with mixed media and performance-based video. On View from the permanent collection—a Yinka Shonibare Food Faerie, a Nick Cave Soundsuit, and a conceptual piece by Peter Sacks—inspired us to consider other artworks that vibrate and move with sumptuous surfaces, embedded texts, an overt and oblique presence of the black body, and our historical legacies of the African and African American experience. 

Featured artworks by El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Glenn Ligon, Grace Ndiritu, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Peter Sacks, Yinka Shonibare, and Lina Iris Viktor. They share charged, tangential and symbolic aesthetics that resonate across the galleries. The works are activated by an array of legacy textiles and hats, selected by David Adjaye—installation in collaboration with the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. 

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