Artist Lina Iris Viktor recently moved from New York to the idyllic Amalfi Coast. In the conversation below, Lina speaks to Katrina Nzegwu about mythological tradition and her new life abroad. All photographs courtesy of the artist.
Lina Iris Viktor is no stranger to mythology. Having relocated less than two years ago from New York to the postcard-perfect Amalfi Coast, the threads of deep time that weave through her artistic construction of cosmologies are inherent to the shores upon which she has made her home – the recourse to stories and symbols of Greco-Roman antiquity. Yet Viktor’s mythology is distinct: diverting from the modes of Western Classicism, her multidisciplinary practice pays heed to a breadth of influences spanning the oral and sculptural traditions of West Africa to the astrological impulses of nonliterate societies; the modalities of European portraiture, to the iconographic legacies of Ancient Egypt.
Oscillating between the aesthetic traditions of multiple continents, cultures and cosmologies, her unique visual vocabulary has been applied to painting, works on paper, sculpture and installations. Central to Viktor’s practice is her enfolding of primordial notions and materials – the sense that any art object she makes exists at once inexorably to our time, time before, and time yet to come. Working with elemental materials such as volcanic rock and precious metals, Viktor draws upon historical and emotive associations to produce works that are as psychically charged as they are beautiful; as effective as they are elucidatory.
Though centering a recapitulation of the black body as framed throughout art history, Viktor’s work is never overly confrontational or didactic. We are presented with her vision of beauty; and invited, but never forced, to find similar solace in her unique reiteration of the world and its symbologies. Currently exhibiting at London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum, we spoke in elucidation of her practice, concepts, and Italian relocation.
Katrina Nzegwu: You were born in the UK to Liberian parents, and now reside upon the Amalfi Coast. You lived in South Africa for a spell as a child, and attended Sarah Lawrence College, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Insofar as your practice deals with diasporic pasts, how has your experiences in diverse cities and cultures come to bear on your work?
Lina Iris Viktor: The most effectual period in my life was going to international school in the UK, from the time I was 9, 10 years old. There were about 250 students from 6th to 12th grade, and about 40-something nationalities represented; my parents moved to South Africa when I was 11 years old, so from then on I was a full time boarder. I lived on campus two-thirds of the year with all these girls from around the world, and that gave me a larger sense of the world, even being in a little town in London, in Kingston. I was boarding with girls from Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, and Japan and Saudi Arabia…some of whom I’m still friends with to this day. There were so many religions and nationalities enfolded. I would do religious practices with my friends, because at that age, you don’t have this sense of having to belong to one thing – you’re much more open. Those formative years were probably the most important in forming what has become my worldview. Travelling, and having exposure…seeing how other people live, other cultures, other traditions and histories…those years taught me how to commingle, to think about things in a more lateral sense, and to pick and choose.
What I gleaned from that experience more than anything, is that it doesn’t matter how disparate one culture may be from another, or how different someone’s religious beliefs may be…at the end of the day, the human experience trumps it all. We are more similar than we are different, and I feel my work is trying to speak to that reality. We like to live in a society, especially in the West, where it’s very much about compartmentalisation; [where] to understand the world, we have to put things in their different boxes. I feel that there’s far more cross referencing across time and culture than these very discrete silos that the West tries to impose upon people, in order to create a sense of order. I’m just a voracious student – trying to see and pick apart how these things correlate with other things that may seem disparate or opposing, but actually have a lot of commonalities.
KN: On this note of cross cultural, or syncretic religious tendencies…much of your work pays heed to the mythological tradition, and the Amalfi coast is similarly steeped in legend – from the Sentiero Degli Dei (Footpath of the Gods), to the founding of its titular city – named for Hercules’ tragically lost, short-lived love, the nymph Amalfi, buried under its cobbled stones. To what extent has the folklore of the region come to bear on the narratives you explore in your practice?
LIV: I still think for me the region is very much a new discovery. I’m very fixated on the story of Pompeii; I visit the island of the sirens, called Li Galli, all the time. We have friends who live there…but classical Greek and Roman mythology has never really been my main focus or interest. Myths are kinds of parables, as are biblical or religious tomes – they’re methods or modes to live, teaching people through stories the right way or the right path, in many ways. There’s so much correlation, for instance with Babylonian mythology…you find very similar cosmic beings and gods and elevated beings in many different mythologies. The new body of work I’m working on is going to bring together the story of the formation of this region, more so than the myth of this region. The fact that we live under the shadow of Vesuvius, and so close to Sicily’s Mount Etna; and that we’re basically living here under a super volcano called the Campi Flegrei which is in the town of Pozzuoli, which is right behind Naples…which I can pretty much see from my house. These are things that are in many ways more impactful to me. The use of materials in my work…these folklores and myths that are very prescient and still palpably happening in the region…they have historical significance but also contemporary significance as well. The state of the world being what it is; the geologies of the world shifting as they are…Those are the things that I’m more drawn to, or have piqued my interest more – how the chaos and destruction has formed this area. It’s always sitting on the precipice of another calamity in many ways.
KN: You’ve spoken a bit already about the materiality of your work, which spans painting, sculpture, photography and performance. Have you seen a shift in the medium you are most drawn to following your relocation?
LIV: Definitely the materials have shifted a lot in the last two, three years. The first sculptures I made were for the Hayward Show, In the Black Fantastic, and those were made out of volcanic stone and bronze. My interest in volcanic stone was actually piqued when I first went to Mexico in 2017, but my interest in using these materials didn’t actually end up manifesting until 2022. There’s always this period of time between when I first start to understand something, and when it actually comes to fruition. After only being here for just over a year, two years in January…I guess I’m still in that discovery mode of how this region will come to effect my work.
I think it’s also partially to do with the Sir John Soane’s Museum, my exhibition there, and his fascination with this region, Pompeii…having snuck in one night when Pompeii was still a restricted area, just being discovered. He washed his house with this Pompeian Red, rosso pompeiano; and that’s the red I started to introduce into my work in 2022, and has been elevated much more with the show at John Soane’s. There are definitely influences, but they’re not at the forefront of my mind. I’m looking at so many things that I can’t really attribute that this is from this region, or I’m doing this because I’m here…it’s more an amalgamation of everything that I’m looking at and experiencing, and pulling those things into the work.
KN: I want to come back to the Sir John Soane’s show, but thinking about your work’s use of earthly materials, such as marble, volcanic rock and gold…they all enfold past and present insofar as they traverse geological time. Can you talk a bit about the role of time in your work?
LIV: At this point it sounds a little trite, but time for me is this sense of circularity – how things play again and again and again…and you can extrapolate that to this sense of cosmic time, and our time on this planet as human beings. How we’ve gone through major cycles – astrological or cosmic cycles, however you want to call them…I’m very interested in the macrocosmic idea of time. I think the materials I use I’m drawn to, because they have such a long history, and such a potential for a long future as well. They outlive us all; their story is much longer than our time here on this planet. I like the sense of stretching time. We exist in this very finite period; to be able to use these materials that predates us by millenia is in of itself fascinating. These materials have the potential to exist forever, they don’t degrade.
My experience of gold is also multifaceted. One of the key aspects around gold is that it’s an immortal metal, in many regards. It’s the most stable metal on the planet – it doesn’t tarnish, it doesn’t fade; there’s only one form of acid that can in any way corrode gold. It really is a metal that can withstand the test of time, even being as malleable and as soft as it is in its purest form. It’s fascinating – the story of how gold has been deposited on our planet, and our recognition from the outset of its value. And not how we contemporarily look at the value system of gold, which is very much economic, but the value being something that’s implicitly spiritual, implicitly cosmic. It has been used by many cultures as a doorway or conduit to other worlds – in religious rites, or as a way to create a space that evokes god or a higher being in cathedrals, temples, churches and mosques. Most cultures bury their dead with gold…gold has always had this very heralded position throughout human society, and – I keep stressing – across time and across cultures.
When I first started using gold, one of the artists that I spoke to about it told me that people recognise real gold when they see it. You have so many approximations of gold – imitation gold leaf, and fool’s gold, and all these things that are meant to create the illusion of gold; and we can do it pretty well. But there’s still this emotional quotient that gold has, that people recognise when they’re in the presence of the real thing. That also stuck with me very much.
The materiality of my work, and the idea of time, is really about playing with materials that I think are timeless.
KN: From your use of material, to your use of colour…even though you use a lot of bright colour, you don’t necessarily use expansive colour palettes. There’s a strong resonance with red, with blue…there’s often three tones, perhaps within a work. I wondered if you could speak a bit about the significance of colour in your work; and whether, now that you’re surrounded by a landscape of extreme polychromatism on the Amalfi Coast, you might expand your colour palettes as well. , particularly with regards to your use of red and blue?
LIV: I always spend a few years on a colour. The first colour most people probably knew me for was the Majorelle Blue…that lasted quite a few years. Right now I’m fascinated with all shades of crimson, burgundy reds…I don’t know, it could just be about the urgency of the time that we’re in, or that I feel like we live on the precipice of impending doom here. This year, in April, there was a lot of hysteria about the seismic activity going on underneath Campi Flegrei…I think people here just live with that. Naples itself celebrates death in a very different way than most societies do. I guess also in Mexico, they celebrate death, which is another heavy seismic zone, right? People are aware of the precarity of things, so they don’t have the same absolute fear in the face of death. But I digress! I was talking about colour.
I like creating self imposed limitations, because I believe, when you do that, you can then play endlessly within it. If I could just play with every colour, I would never come to a conclusion. I would never reach any synthesis, because there’s too many variables, too many options. I’m not a person that thrives with having too many options, I like to be very focused. So there’s a practical reality around my use of colour. I think that I hone in on something that at the time is speaking to where I am emotionally, spiritually, artistically.
KN: In your new locale of Italy, you are surrounded by abundant greenery – a colour you don’t often use within your work, even though foliage is a common motif. Do you think this will come to bear on your work?
LIV: It’s very green, it’s very verdant, it’s very lush, which I love – I’ve become a bit of a gardener here. I love taking care of plants, and obviously it features in my work, but not greens, as you said. I had a moment where I was thinking about playing with greens, but I’m not there yet. It’s like I said, you think about things and it takes a couple, maybe even a few years to manifest truly into the work.
There’s these beautiful green marbles I’m obsessed with right now, but I have no idea how to use them yet. It’s in the back of my mind, it’s percolating. It takes a moment to jump to the next thing, and I think I still haven’t finished with the reds yet.
KN: I mean red has such resonance across myriad cultures, as a colour. Your work uniquely fuses the cultural modes of European classicism with the sculptural and iconographic traditions of West Africa and Ancient Egypt…You’ve touched on it, but I wondered if you could speak a bit about how you balance these elements in the creation of a cosmology within your work; and then in relation to historical presumptions about the representation of “blackness”?
LIV: In past works I’ve focused far more on the idea of representation. I think there was a void that needed to be filled; I really felt there was an urgency there. The fact that there has been this vacuum of Black artists rising to a certain level of prominence, and having their work in certain halls and museums and all these things…I mean it’s kind of like Kerry James Marshall’s focus, throughout his career. For me, representation was very important – as a Black woman, as an African woman living in the West. I’ve always approached it less from a reactive position – of feeling that I need to prove or state something; or bash people over the head with our import, or why it’s wrong to relegate certain people to certain kinds of hierarchies and so on and so forth. I always approached it from more of an educational standpoint. It’s about the discoveries and my own experiences, gleaned from my research and my social circles, the people I’m speaking to – I want to impart that information. Earlier works, I guess 2015-era works, even up until 2019, 2020, were really about exploring historical narratives and inclusion. You have the Dark Continent series, which is all about a play on 19th century ideas about Africa as a monolith – this dark continent; this unexplored hinterland of savages that needed to be acculturated, and needed to have Western religion, ideologies and norms brought to their society to humanise them. Then you have series like Constellations, which is more about finding multiple symbols. Many of them [are] engrained in a variety of African symbologies, most of them West African, drawn from textiles, from scripts…things that I think are universal. But I’m not trying to be didactic about it, I’m not trying to tell people how to see. I believe that once you see certain symbols, there’s an intuition people can glean without having to have a literal translation of what they mean. I believe a lot of these symbols and modes of communication are universal, and not as finite as modern language. For a lot of my early work that was very important – to dive into identity & inclusion. Now, because I feel there’s such a proliferation of artists talking about identity, talking about culture, putting the black figure forward…my interests have swerved away a bit to, I guess, the more obtuse things. It doesn’t have to be so obvious what the African, or Black “agenda” behind it may be; to me it’s more about bringing forth universality.
For instance, I’m obsessed with the Dogon of Mali right now. I’ve been obsessed with them for years, but I really find a deep interest in them right now. Their focus as a society is actually cosmological. They don’t really have a written language; they don’t have any formal script. They pass their knowledge – which some say harkens all the way back to Ancient Egypt – through verbal means. But then you see their architecture, and how they build their societies, and how they have gleaned their position in the universe, and how they were able to read the stars in the way that they did. For example, they were the first to discover Sirius B, which Western society didn’t discover until they had telescopes 100 or so years ago. In many ways that kind of knowledge and that kind of understanding transcends a particular locale. It transcends just being in Mali, or just being on the [African] continent. Many cultures, I’d probably say more ancient cultures, understood the larger cosmic relationship between them, or us, and our planet and the cosmos – far more than we do contemporarily. This can be extrapolated from being in Mali with the Dogon, to a lot of Mesoamerican cultures who also understood this; to the Nubian and Egyptian cultures that understood these things; to the South East Asian cultures ; to the Aboriginals of Australia . I want to show the cross referencing across cultures which I think are not really a part of modernity yet, but have knowledge that supersedes a lot of our discoveries that have come about through modernity. So that’s really my interest, in a kind of circuitous way!
KN: That wasn’t circuitous at all! I mean there’s historical layers, and mythological layers and cultural layers, but there’s also physical layers in your work. They have textures, and this amazing sense of tactility. In your photo diary there’s an image of a fresco at Pompeii, which has bearing to your portraits, but also is completely flat. Can you speak a bit about the manner in which you arrange your portraits, and how this relates to or interacts with classical compositional modes?
LIV: So much of my creative process happens in my head. It doesn’t happen on the canvas, I have to see things. I’m looking, and I take this thing from here, and take this thing from there; I start to put it together in my brain, I’m doing some sketches…everything is very preconceived as I come to the canvas, and then I start to plot those ideas onto [it]. Once I have the skeleton of the work, the composition, which I think is the most complex part to figure out – then I start to fill in to see how things need to visually play with the eye; in terms of relief, in terms of different materials.
It’s that same idea about colour – I like to have endless play within a very structured playground. The composition to me is my structure. You create a limited playground area, and then you can play endlessly within that space. I like to lean towards complexity, and I think that’s also why I like to play with so many different materials. Diana Vreeland says that the eye has to wander, right? For me, what really interests me is not just the work itself – whether it’s challenging, or beautiful, or whatever the adjective you want to use is – but then, how? How did someone make it? I like it to seem like a puzzle; I like work that makes me figure out how that was done.
KN: The backgrounds in your work, especially in your more figurative, or representational works – they have this sensibility of stage sets, or backdrops. I know you have a background in performance, you studied film originally. As you’ve evolved, and you’ve started making more sculptural and installation works, how does that performativity come into play?
LIV: I’m always thinking scenically – that’s the theatre and film attribution, I imagine. I don’t care to just show my work in a white wall gallery, I think there should be something in tandem happening. The work has to exist by itself, don’t get me wrong, as in the painting or sculpture or whatever you’re making. At the same time, I want to make it far more alive, by making the space feel it has a certain potency in and of itself – then the work is there to further enhance that conversation. I want it to have its own power, and then when it’s placed together in an ordered way it elevates that potency to a certain level, and imparts the feeling.
KN: You also have an interest in architecture, and the manner in which spatial interventions correspond to and affect behaviour. Can you speak a bit more about this?
LIV: We live in space, we’re always in buildings – people take that for granted. Certain buildings elicit inspirational energies, and some bring you down and depress you. Some spaces, when you enter them…coming back to churches and mosques and sacred spaces…are built to elevate the human spirit. I’m always thinking in those terms, and I’m working, usually, within existing spaces. So then it’s – ok, what can I manipulate in this space to elicit a certain reaction? I think you’ll feel that when you go to Soane’s as well, because the space is already so evocative, and so charged, and so full of so much of a vision of a man, right? But there’s still space within that to put your mark on it if you choose to, and I think that – with the team I worked with, with my galleries – that was very much fulfilled.
With the John Soane’s show, we spent about two years just talking about what we were going to do before I even started making any work. It was two years of just conceiving how each space will be transformed and interacted with in relation to the rest of the museum…that was probably the longest period of production, if you will. It’s a very important part of how I approach each project.
KN: That’s a perfect segue into my next question, which was to invite you to talk a bit more about your collaborative exhibition with the John Soane’s Museum. Both your practice and the museum are defined by the bringing together of cultural artefacts and visual references from diverse cultures, and across history, so it kind of seems like a perfect match.
LIV: It was kind of a shock to me honestly when Louise, the curator, approached me in 2020. It was probably just the beginning of the pandemic, and all I really knew about this space was that Sir John Soane was a prominent British architect of his era still celebrated to this day; had bequeathed his house to the city as it was, and it was maintained in his vision – that was one of the prerequisites for him bequeathing it to the city. I hadn’t been to the space before; I was still in New York at the time. I think its reputation preceded itself in many ways, because of its architectural import in the city. I’m a neophyte student of architecture; I really love architecture and studying architects, so that was the first thing that sparked my interest.
I came and saw the space in May, or June of 2020…it was a very special experience. Obviously it was lockdown, so it was just me and Louise, and no one else in the museum. Everything was shut and all the lights were off, and we got to walk through this labyrinth. It was a very unique experience, and I had to sit on that for a while. I don’t know if every project feels this way, but this felt very overwhelming. Like – there’s so much in here, how is [the work] not going to be overshadowed, or in conflict or in competition with all the things in here. I wanted to hit the right tone.
You can come at it from a confrontational way, like – oh, you have a huge hole in your collection; you’re very much Western focussed, and there’s this very big vacuum for many other cultures, including African cultures. Instead, I [thought] of it more like: let’s have a conversation. [Soane existed] in a certain time; I can’t hold him to the same standards of our 21st century thought. I can’t look back on the past and think that shouldn’t have been done, or that shouldn’t have been taken, because that was the modus operandi for his time and his era. And, despite our modern interpretations he was very much ahead of his curve. He was very much doing what his contemporaries were not doing, and having the interest and the forethought to show the city what he was thinking through his architecture & collection. I think he was a very enigmatic and interesting character, and so for me, it was – how can I complement this with my own amalgamation, my own menagerie of ideas. Because that’s what the space was for him.
I look at the colonnade which is outside the Foyle Space, which is the most famous image of the museum with all the busts, and the display of artefacts and sculptures…and to me that was him building his own kind of constellation, of what intrigued him, and what he thought was important and would stand the test of time, and so [the question] was – what do I think I need to impart in here that would be of importance, and stand the test of time? It was exciting to think about what my work could do to add to this conversation.
I think the way that he picked and chose his collection; the way that I pick and choose the things I show in my work – it’s with the same kind of intentionality. Louise saw that before I saw that, because initially I had no idea what I was going to add to this museum; and how it was going to make sense. That’s why it took four years to do the show – but when it started to develop, it developed in a hurry; things picked up very quickly. The interesting thing about that space though, is because it’s a heritage site and a historical building…it’s not a museum in the contemporary sense. There are no huge doors where you can bring in huge sculptures…everything comes through the front door in the same way people do. That has to be considered with everything that’s being made; the weights of everything, the heights of everything. We had to make a lot of composite sculptures; everything had to be assembled in situ because it couldn’t be brought in as one piece. It was almost a show done in reverse. I had to know what the limitations were and then think backwards about what I wanted to create to sit in that space that fits those parameters. It was a challenging experience and there was no wriggle room, and those are very different challenges from working with normal museums. It pushed a different kind of muscle, having to create in that way. It was a very collaborative experience with the galleries, with the museum, with everyone involved, because so many things had to be technically figured out before you could even start conceiving the work.
KN: There’s a beautiful sense of democracy to the fact that art and people have to come in and leave the same way, which I love. I was also very drawn to the title of the show – Mythic Time / Tens of Thousands of Rememberings. In conclusion, can you talk a bit about the choice of the title – this notion of “mythic time” and layers of memory?
LIV: The mythic time I think speaks to this idea, like I said, of the circularity of time, and how I view things. His space exists within a particular time in the 19th century – but there are objects and artefacts that he’s collected that transcend that time. That’s what’s interesting about it. There’s a lot to answer, because you can also think about the layers of the building…there’s a crypt which [he built] near the end of his life. He’d pondered on the death of his wife for a long time, and then was facing his own demise, and built the crypt as one of the last things in his house to be a meditation on time, and life, and death, and (im)mortality. He was very much thinking about time in his collection; about his own time on the planet, as well as objects of the past from many years before. For me, like I said, I like to make work that seems timeless, so there is this sense of it belonging to a kind of mythology, rather than to a linear formatting of time. He created his own mythology, and every single piece in that collection speaks to its own mythology as well. It’s steeped in Greco-Roman and classical art; and then my work – the Constellation series is the first thing you see when you enter, and that is very much a meditation on time as well. On how time is transcendent amongst culture, and amongst space, when you’re dealing with cosmological conversations. The mythic time was this sensation that we’re existing within and without time in this space; and the work I’m adding to that could exist now, could exist in the past, could exist in the future, and there’s no time stamp on it. The Tens of Thousands of Rememberings was…well, he left what was his fascination in that space; he collected what he was obsessed with, what he cared about, which belongs to a very particular tradition. What I’m adding is a different conversation around that tradition. He remembers things, or he has added things to the fabric of time in a way that was true to him, and I hope I’m doing that with my rememberings of what I think is important. Rememberings of the future, of the past – it’s this kind of liminal space, and I think he existed in that liminal space too with the intentionality of his building and his art collecting. We all have different ways of remembering things, and future rememberings and past remembering as well, harking back to this circularity of time. Remembering is not just the past. So that’s where the title came from.
