LONDON: AUTOGRAPH

Group Tours
Lina Iris Viktor Exhibition

Free, booking essential

About the Event

Book a free tour of Lina Iris Viktor's immersive exhibition for your group or class. Led by a member of Autograph's staff, you'll learn more about Viktor's vision and influences as an artist. 

Viktor's 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.

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



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Autograph

Rivington Place

London

RE2A 3BA


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Viktor’s large works on paper and canvas draw on a variety of artistic traditions and visual influences, from European portraiture, classical mythology and astronomy, to ancient Egyptian and African symbolism.

The works in the first gallery are exclusively black and gold. Viktor’s Dark Continent series dominates the space: its solitary female figure in a monochromatic landscape is illuminated by gilded solar and lunar symbols. The figure is the artist’s own form, her body shrouded in deep, matt black paint, her hair golden; at times contemplative and elusive, at other times provocative and alluring. These works represent an imaginary riposte to imperial narratives of empire and expansion, and the nineteenth-century myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’.

Viktor often deploys her body in her conceptual art practice, the sole performer in a meticulously crafted cosmology. Combining photography, performance, painting and sculpture with ancient gilding techniques, she creates intricate, densely layered surfaces characterised by her ritualistic use of 24-karat gold leaf. For Viktor, gold is both substance and symbol, a conduit to spiritual transcendence. In the centre of the gallery, The Black Ark invites visitors to move through a site-specific installation of large-scale latticed panels of carved wood, an architectural structure inspired by the nets of Liberian fisherman and mashrabiyas. Exploring notions of ‘race’, history and ownership, the installation obscures some artworks while highlighting others, making them in the artist’s words ‘at once visible and obfuscated’.

The darkened, tropical foliage of the Dark Continent series reappears here as sculptures (Black Botanica), liberated from the confines of the painted, still image. Constellations IX foregrounds the artist’s interest in the coded languages of abstraction. In this elaborately gilded canvas, a maze of signs and intricate imagery alludes to subliminal, universal modes of communication beyond the restrictive boundaries of language, evoking more visceral forms of expression.

In three variations of Materia Prima, the mother work that inspired the Dark Continent series, Viktor appears as a commanding pan-cultural deity, emanating an aura of power, authority and regality. The second gallery is painted in deep ultramarine blue, emulating the ‘Blue Room’ in the artist’s studio. A meditative space is built within the gallery featuring Syzygy, Viktor’s first figurative canvas reflecting the aesthetic vernacular the artist has developed over the past four years.

Also on view are three works from A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred. These works reinterpret the Libyan Sybil, a prophetess from antiquity invoked by eighteenth-century abolitionists as a mythical oracle who foresaw the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The series explores the extraordinary story of the founding of Liberia to examine fraught narratives of migration, colonialism and oppression.

The works brought together in Some Are Born To Endless Night —Dark Matter constitute a bold reclamation of creative agency, and historical and transcultural reimagining. The exhibition reflects the artist and curator’ shared desire to create an all-immersive, symbiotic environment, in which to engage viewers and provide a transformative experience.

how to book

We look forward to welcoming your group to Autograph. Free exhibition tours are available for community groups, secondary schools, FE / HE, and special interest groups. Due to the immersive nature of the exhibition, there is a maximum of 20 people per group. Please note that the exhibition contains nudity. 

To book a tour, please contact lucy@autograph-abp.co.uk




ABOUT THE ARTIST

Lina Iris Viktor lives and works itinerantly between New York and London. Raised in London to Liberian parents, she travelled extensively in her youth, and also lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for several years. Viktor’s multifaceted practice is informed by a background in theatre and film at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and her continued studies in photography and design at The School of Visual Arts, along with an education in performance arts during high school. Working with a restricted colour palette, her artworks are a blend of photography, performance and abstract painting, along with the ancient practice of gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with ‘layers of light’.

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Selected solo exhibitions include A Heaven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, NOMA, New Orleans (2018); The Black Ark, The Armory Show, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, New York (2018); Black Exodus: Act 1 – Materia Prima, Amar Gallery, London (2017); Arcadia, Gallery 151, New York (2014).

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.



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Lina Iris Viktor at Autograph 

13 SEPT 2019 - 25 JAN 2020

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Accessibility at autograph

Everyone is welcome at Autograph. Our building Rivington Place is an accessible space with a step-free entrance at street level, and a lift to all floors. Unisex, accessible toilets are located on all floors.

Download our Accessibility Guide for detailed access information about our venue and transport.

We are happy to help. If you would like to discuss your visit, or have any questions, please contact us at info@autograph-abp.co.uk or 020 7749 9200



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EXHIBITION SUPPORTED BY

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England



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Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born To Endless Night — Dark Matter is curated by Renée Mussai

Banner image: Exhibition opening at Autograph, London. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell.

Page images, from top left: 1) Exhibition opening at Autograph, London. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell. 2) Exhibition opening at Autograph, London. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell. 3) Lina Iris Viktor- Some Are Born To Endless Night- Dark Matter at Autograph London 13 September - 25 January 2020. Curated by Renée Mussai. Photograph courtesy Ben Reeves. 4) Lina Iris Viktor, Third, from the series A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, 2017-8. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. 5) Exhibition opening at Autograph, London. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell. 6) Exhibition opening at Autograph, London. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell. 7) Rivington Place, home of Autograph. Photograph by Zoe Maxwell. 8) Lina Iris Viktor- Some Are Born To Endless Night- Dark Matter at Autograph London 13 September - 25 January 2020. Curated by Renée Mussai. Photograph courtesy Ben Reeves.