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 copies, 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.

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.

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 new texts by celebrated writers Christina Sharpe, Emmanuel Iduma and Yrsa Daley-Ward. An in-depth conversation between the artist and curator Renée Mussai is included in three parts.

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 to accompany Autograph's exhibition Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night — Dark Matter  (12 September 2019 – 25 January 2020).

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: £48

With kind support by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery

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