A Love Letter to Lina Iris Viktor
When was the first time you saw a large scale solo exhibition of a visual artists work who happened to be from the same ethnic background as you?
Mine was Chris Ofili at Tate Britain in 2010, then nothing until the Lubaina Himid retrospective Invisible Strategies at Modern Art Oxford in 2017, followed by Zanele Muholi at Autograph and the Basquiat: Boom For Real show at the Barbican all in that same year.
Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how significant the lack of an experience is until you’ve tasted it.
When we talk about representation it feels at times as though we’re so busy fighting for scraps it’s incredibly difficult to discuss ‘taking over’ anything. Too scary, too provocative. Too close to some folks deepest fears.
Yet when artists do take over a space, and I mean really take over, everything changes.
The experience in the foyer of the National Theatre before Inua Ellam’s Barber Shop Chronicles was perhaps as impactful as the play itself. Afrobeats and grime were filtering through the speakers. Loud. The message was clear: tonight this is your home and if you want to shaku and shout you are welcome, let them tut.
I visited Lina Iris Viktor’s transformative exhibition Some Are Born To Endless Night - Dark Matter curated by Renée Mussai at Autograph in London in December with my dear friend Gaylene and have thought of it daily ever since.
Lina Iris Viktor is a young Liberian British artist whose care for the context of her own work is notable. In 2018 she turned down an offer to feature her work in a Kendrick Lamar video for the Black Panther soundtrack, only to have it copied - she sued and later settled. Her guts and self-belief left me expectant.
It wasn’t just the presence of her breathtakingly regal black and gold embellished women that struck me - or at least not in the same way the gaze in Zanele Muholi’s starkly powerful self-portraits followed you around that same space - as much as Viktor’s invitation to immerse yourself in their world.
The ground floor is taken over by a massive forest structure with plants painted black and huge black panels breaking up the whiteness of the space.
I never feel the metaphorical frustration of white as a default colour as acutely as I do in galleries and museums, and here the blackness felt incredibly bold. Or at least it did until we got upstairs and entered one of the most visually stimulating and opulent rooms I’ve ever experienced, the Palace of Versailles included.
I’d found the Yves Klein retrospective at Bozar in Brussels in 2017 interesting, though not particularly moving, until I stood above a sandy pit of the vibrant ultramarine blue colour he had registered in Paris as “IKB”. That pit calls on you to fall forwards, face first, and get lost inside the pigment. I know this because a security guard hovered right next to me in case I went for it.
Lina Iris Viktor reimagined that blue and its far longer history from the mines of Afghanistan and use in jewellery by ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, and painted an entire room with it. She then proceeded to hang a couple of her largest portraits of beautiful black women adorned in gold luxuriously far apart inside it. The space feels sacred.
Inside the room there’s a box that does allow for you to become enshrined within the colour. It contains a single portrait and a bench on which to sit and drink it all in (and so that you don’t fall forwards face first, I presume). The expression of the exquisitely robed, gold haloed woman glancing over her shoulder at you is fittingly regal. The security guard keeps his distance and smiles warmly.
If you’ve been lucky enough to visit one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored installation rooms, or just to sit with golden sunlight on your face after too many cloudy days, you understand precisely the sensation of trying to absorb a visual experience through every pore. The default white gallery wall felt like a laughable idea in that moment.
My gratitude for these spaces, black spaces, at this present moment is profound. I explained to a white friend recently how exhausting it is existing in a land in which white cultural ideals, norms and languages are the default, so much so that to point it out confuses people.
What do you mean this isn’t the norm for everyone?
Being in a black space feels freeing. There is no translation or explaining to be done. The lack of contextual cards underneath Lina Iris Viktor’s works feels very intentional; a provocation, to go deeper than words.
Recently I went to a club night in Barcelona called Voodoo, with 300 young black people I rarely see in the street here who come together to dance to African music. I felt like a proud aunty singing along to J Hus and Wande Coal as kids jumped on stage to perform their routines. I don’t speak Spanish or Catalan, but we communicated in a shared cultural language that filled me with a deep sense of belonging and joy.
The constant psychological assault of the news, the pain of which is refracted and echoed through thousands of voices via social media, is draining. Racism doesn’t exist, it’s all in your head. Oscars so white. Brit Awards So White. She only won that award because she’s black. It’s all in your head. 2% of Executive Directors in the arts are people of colour. We need a new diversity scheme this isn’t working. It’s all in your head.
To visit a space full of art or music that energises you, that glorifies you, that doesn’t conform, revives your spirit.
Recently, visionary musician Moses Sumney Tweeted “Feels like an absolutely insane and futile time to be releasing and promoting music”. Whether that was a reflection of the hostile environment the music industry provides for artists or simply the state of our world, it’s a tough time for the people who generate emotional fuel for the rest of us.
It’s also tough taking a moment to absorb that fuel, whilst trying to fix the problems that eat away at us, deplete our energies and steal our peace.
How do you justify reading poetry when there are so many fires to fight? Yet surely that’s the very reason Roger Robinson’s Portable Paradise won the TS Eliot prize in 2020, as the world catches up to his powerful words?
And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep
What kind of paradise do you keep secreted about your person or hidden away in your heart? I wear a deep blue scarf wrapped around my neck: it matches my mind.
You can, and should, try to visit Lina Iris Viktor’s work at Autograph in Shoreditch, London, for free until January 25th. In 2010 that might have been it, but in 2020 there’s also Kara Walker and Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern, and Steve McQueen at Tate Britain to name but a few.
In many other countries around the world that same story is slowly, messily, and with great difficulty coming true for artists from the African diaspora who have long been underrepresented in visual art, theatre, film, literature, music and dance.
Our progress is not without a price, and the more progress we make the louder the protest will be. The louder the protest gets the more we’ll need Lubaina’s Invisible Strategies, Roger’s Portable Paradise, and Moses singing to us to hold out, a little bit more, more, just a little bit more.
I hope you’ll find time to luxuriate in the gold, the blue and the black.
