b. 1987, Liberia
Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British conceptual artist, painter, and performance artist. She lives and works itinerantly between Italy and London.
The multi-disciplinary approach to her work, which weaves disparate materials and methods belonging both to contemporary and ancient art forms calls into question the nature of time and being. Her works are a merging of painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, along with the practice of water gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with “layers of light”. Viktor regards these dark canvases to be “light-works”. Each provoke a philosophical commentary through material that at once addresses the infinite and the finite, immortality and mortality, the microcosm and macrocosm, in addition to the socio-political and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.
Viktor’s practice is informed by a background in film which she studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and her continued studies within photography at The School of Visual Arts, along with an early education in performance arts. Within her oeuvre Viktor creates her own linguistic & visual mythology — “[a] notion of unruly visual pleasure as a politics for refusal.”