Lina Iris Viktor

Mythic Time / Tens of thousands of rememerings

Sir John Soane’s Museum | London, United Kingdom

July 10th , 2024 — January 19th 2025

Sir John Soane’s Museum is delighted to introduce Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings, a collaborative exhibition between artist Lina Iris Viktor and the Museum.

Viktor’s work unearths connections across time and cultures, from ancient Egypt to medieval illumination and indigenous Australian art. In bringing together these connections, she mirrors Soane’s own eclectic approach to collecting objects from varied cultures and time periods. Viktor’s sculptural works, made especially for this exhibition, are interspersed throughout the Museum, introducing new presences and memories into Soane’s former home.

Spanning sculpture, painting, photography and gilding, Viktor’s practice explores the complexities of time, memory and historic traditions. Both her sculptural works and paintings employ ancient, elemental materials, from bronze and ceramic to wood and silk, drawing on their primal, timeless qualities, as well as their formal characteristics.

The fusion of motifs, materials and fragments of time across Viktor’s work and the Soane collection imbues the Museum with new layers of memory, immersing audiences in a Mythic Time of Viktor’s own creation.

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Solar Angels & Lunar Lords

Pilar Corrias | London, United Kingdom

June 5th — July 13th 2024

Viktor’s first solo show at Pilar Corrias sees the artist move away from narrative painting toward formal experimentation, while continuing to underscore the enduring importance of reframing the cultural associations of light and darkness. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from ancient astrology, referencing the proverbial war between the sun and moon during eclipses, and the transitory interplay of light and dark.

Within her work, Viktor embraces a rich tapestry of cultural references, symbolism and sensory experience, integrating forms from the West African visual cultures of the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Benin. Ethically-sourced earthen materials – including silk and silkworm cocoons from India, natural raffia from Madagascar, 24-carat gold, banana yarn and bronze – come together in formations that reference traditional West African pottery, jewellery and woodwork, as well as Modernist African architecture. Bridging geographical and historical boundaries, Viktor synthesises her ancestral heritage with contemporary modes of expression to foreground the political and aesthetic legacies of material extraction and exchange.

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Some are Born to Endless Night — Dark Matter

Autograph | London, United Kingdom

September 13th 2019 — January 25th 2020

Become immersed in deep lustres of black punctuated with luminous 24-karat gold and opulent ultramarine blue hues in Lina Iris Viktor’s singular artistic universe.

Her 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.

This is the British-Liberian artist’s first major solo institutional exhibition in the UK, with more than 60 works on display in two galleries.

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A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred.

New Orleans Museum of Art | New Orleans, Louisiana

October 5th 2018 — January 6th 2019

Recasting factual and fantastical narratives surrounding America’s involvement in the founding of Liberia, “Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred”. explores a mythicized history of the West African nation. Central to Viktor’s gilded portraits is the mercurial figure of the Libyan Sibyll; from the Latin “sibyl” meaning prophetess, she is an ancient figure of fate and foresight, later invoked by eighteenth-century abolitionists as the predictor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

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