Lina Iris Viktor: Dark Testament

In Viktor’s artistic universe, black is conjured as a deeply generative force: the proverbial ‘materia prima’, the source, the dark matter that birthed everything. Gold, for Viktor, is both symbol and substance, a spiritual conduit of transcendence. The artist, whose conceptual practice draws on a variety of artistic traditions and visual influences from European portraiture, classical mythology and astronomy, to ancient Egyptian and African symbolism, routinely deploys her own body in her figurative works, cast as the sole performer in a meticulously crafted cosmology where her body-as-canvas is abstracted through lustres of black and centred as the universal human form – a vessel through which narratives are woven, histories entwined, and possible futures imagined.

In Dark Continent, a solitary female figure – shrouded in black paint, her hair golden – inhabits an imaginary monochromatic landscape of silver, grey and black hues, its deep lustrous blackness punctuated by luminous gilded solar/lunar symbols. At times contemplative and elusive, at times provocative and alluring, she occupies each frame seemingly absorbed in her own private reverie, yet occasionally challenges the viewer with a direct gaze, thus breaking the illusion of her isolated existence, and con- fronting inherent voyeurisms with a prophetic sense of foreboding.

This body of work – which comprises Act I, II, III, IV as well Dark Testament and The Seven – represents an imaginary riposte to the nineteenth-century myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’, a sinister place of danger and chaos. Playing with notions of colonial ‘discovery’, Viktor invites viewers to contemplate the meaning of darkness and light, through a communion of past, present and future tenses and a creative engagement of speculative visual fiction and the birthing of new mythologies. Accompanied by an extended caption-poem of exquisite, redolent image titles, the series’ existential questions remain unanswered.

Throughout the exhibition, the Dark Continent’s tropical foliage is liberated from the confines of the painted still image and presented as black floor-based sculptures and wall stencils entitled Black Botanica (2019). The latest variations in the series subtitled The Seven – the final pieces currently still in production – are included as image projections, seen together for the first time. Also featured is Materia Prima (2016): the ‘mother work’ that inspired the Dark Continent series, and one of Viktor’s earliest large-scale figurative gilded canvas works. Here, Viktor appears as a commanding pan-cultural deity, emanating an aura of power, authority and regality – her body posed against an intricate maze of elaborate signs and symbol, a coded vernacular that alludes to subliminal modes of communication and visceral forms of expression.

The extraordinary works brought together in Dark Testament constitute a bold reclamation of historical and transcultural reimagining, and the creation of all-immersive visual universes and symbiotic environments, in which to engage viewers with a transformative experience, and offer a space for reflection.

“At the core of Lina Iris Viktor’s singular artistic practice are complex, cultural narratives and potent mediations on ‘blackness and being’: each sumptuous work is layered with profound provocations, fuelled by her astute interest in etymology, astrophysics and remedial recovery. In a productive equilibrium between aesthetics and politics, history is creatively reimagined through an emphasis on the circularity of time, and an affirmative, visionary excavation of our collective pasts and possible futures.” -  Renée Mussai, Curator.

Since 2014 her work has featured in numerous group exhibitions internationally, including recently Radical Love at Ford Foundation Gallery, New York (2019); Get Up, Stand Up at Somerset House, London (2019); and Re-Significations: European Blackamoors, Africa Readings, Manifesta Art Biennial 12, Palermo, Italy (2018), among others. Viktor was a contributor to the 2019 Spring issue of Harper’s Bazaar. 

Her work is held in the public collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; the Crocker Museum of Fine Art, Sacramento, California; Autograph, London; and many private collections worldwide. She is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, Chicago.