Seventh (2018) © Lina Iris Viktor, Courtesy the Artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
When British-Liberian artist Lina Iris Viktor enrolled in college in the United States, she was confronted with the subject of race and identity in a manner she had never considered prior to coming to America. “I realised what it meant to be Black in the US, and experienced the cultural realities that came with it,” Viktor tells AnOther.
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Charged with the desire to examine her roots and explore her heritage, Viktor discovered an inextricable link in Pan-African history that has become the very heart of the new exhibition, Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred, now on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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Here, Viktor looks back to the founding of Liberia, Africa’s first and oldest modern republic. Established in 1822 by the American Colonization Society, Liberia was originally imagined as a conduit for the resettlement of free-born and formerly enslaved Black Americans in the early days of the abolitionist movement.
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Artists and writers of the era seized the figure of the “Libyan Sibyl,” a prophetess from classical antiquity who foretold of tragedy, and recast her in the image of activist and freed slave Sojourner Truth – a symbol Viktor embraces throughout this series of glorious large-scale self-portraits exquisitely gilded with 24-carat gold. Here, Viktor shares her journey across time and space, reclaiming the lost narratives that demand to be told.
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Eleventh (2018) © Lina Iris Viktor, Courtesy the Artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery