In her new exhibition A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred at The New Orleans Museum of Art, Lina Iris Viktor reimagines Liberia’s colonial past through the eyes of the prophetic priestess “Libyan Sybil”, who has been portrayed as a foreteller of terrible fates since antiquity and was subsequently used as a motif by the
American abolitionist movement. Viktor draws from her own Liberian ancestry, West African textiles, gold leaf, astronomy and Afrofuturism to examine the historical complexities of a nation formed as a colony for emancipated African American slaves and their descendants. Much like the three-part title, she investigates the fantasy that such a nation offered, along with the horrifying realities and subsequent conflicts that the country has endured, all through the omniscient spirit of Sybil.
