Inaugurated in 1991, ICA Artists' Editions are special productions made for the Institute of Contemporary Arts by some of the most interesting artists working today. All proceeds from the sales of these works directly support our future events, exhibitions and learning programme.
Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Italy.
Interweaving disparate materials, methods and visual lexicons associated with contemporary and ancient art forms, Viktor authors an idiosyncratic mythology that threads through deep time, knitting together a diasporic past with an expansive present in order to divine future imaginaries.
The artist’s practice is equally informed by her background in film, preceded by an early education in performance arts. Her synthesis of painting, sculpture, performance, photography and water-gilding with 24-carat gold produces a charged materiality that at once addresses philosophical ideas of the finite and the infinite, the microcosm and macrocosm, evanescence and eternity. In her recent sculptures and paintings, the use of materials once embedded deep within the earth – gold, black marble and volcanic rock – establishes a timelessness both intimate and intangible.
Within Viktor’s cosmology, black as matter and as colour plays the lead role of materia prima or the primordial source of life, a provocation and a challenge to the sociopolitical and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.