Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter

Winner of the British Book Awards 2021 in the Exhibition Catalogue category.

Accompanying Autograph’s critically-acclaimed Lina Iris Viktor exhibition, this is the first comprehensive monograph showcasing the British-Liberian artist’s work. Published in a limited print run of only 750, Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter is a beautifully produced, deluxe artist book with cloth cover, gilded page edges, embossed lettering in gold foil, and gloss varnished black-on-black endpapers. The book’s design reflects the artist’s intricate, labyrinthine patterns, her playful emphasis on different tonalities and densities of black, and ritualistic use of 24-karat gold.

Bringing together a curated selection of Viktor’s exquisite black, gold and ultramarine blue colour works, Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter is enriched with photographs documenting Autograph’s exhibition, and written contributions by Christina Sharpe, Emmanuel Iduma, Yrsa Daley-Ward and curator Renée Mussai. An in-depth conversation between the artist and Mussai is included in three parts.

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. Her extraordinary figurative works – based on photographs, then painted over and gilded – are infused with the cultural, historical and material implications and multifaceted notions of ‘blackness’: as colour, value and socio-political consciousness.

The core of the publication comprises 48 works from Viktor's Dark Continent series, an imaginary riposte to the nineteenth-century myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’. In these works, a solitary female figure – naked, shrouded in black paint, her hair golden – inhabits an imaginary monochromatic landscape, its lustrous darkness punctuated by solar and lunar symbols. Each image is accompanied by a narrative title that collectively forms an extended poem.

This book invites you to become immersed in Viktor’s meticulously crafted, bold visual cosmology – centring the black figure as the universal human form through which narratives are woven, histories entwined, and possible futures imagined.

Published by Autograph, 2020
Edited and introduced by Renée Mussai
Designed by Typographics EDT
Pages: 224
Images: 88
Dimensions: 280mm x 230mm portrait
Hardcover (black cloth)
Texts in English
ISBN: 978-1-899282-77-7 RPP: £55
With kind support by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
Published to accompany Autograph's exhibition Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night — Dark Matter, 12 September 2019 – 25 January 2020.

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