LINA IRIS VIKTOR
OkayAfrica's 100 Women celebrates African women who are making waves, shattering ceilings, and uplifting their communities.
Lina Iris Viktor, the conceptual artist, performance artist and painter, lives and works between London and New York. Born to Liberian parents, she studied film at Sarah Lawrence College and photography and design at The School of Visual Arts. Viktor employs ancient and contemporary art practices, including gilding with 24 karat gold to create dark canvases that have “layers of light.”
Viktor has exhibited at Harvard University and engaged in panels at the institution, to name a few of her notable achievements.
She will debut a public, solo exhibition, 11 Meditations on Illumination, at New York University’s Kimmel Galleries in March and will be in conversation with New School professor and Sunu Journal creator, Amy Sall at The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
According to the artist, each work provokes “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.”
-JO