Fatimah Tuggar (born 15 August 1967) is a interdisciplinary artist born in
Nigeria
Nigeria ( ), , ig, Naìjíríyà, yo, Nàìjíríà, pcm, Naijá , ff, Naajeeriya, kcg, Naijeriya officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf o ...
and based in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology.Jegede, Dele (2009). ''Encyclopedia of African American Artists''. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 235-237. She is currently an Associate Professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the
University of Florida
The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida, traces its origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its ...
in the United States.
Early life and education
Tuggar was born in
Kaduna
Kaduna is the capital city of Kaduna State, and the former political capital of Northern Nigeria. It is located in north-western Nigeria, on the Kaduna River. It is a trade Centre and a major transportation hub as the gateway to northern Nige ...
Kansas City Art Institute
The Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) is a private art school in Kansas City, Missouri. The college was founded in 1885 and is an accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and Higher Learning Commission. It has approx ...
in the United States in 1992. She completed her MFA in sculpture at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
in 1995, and conducted a one-year postgraduate independent study at the
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
from 1995-1996. She also attended Kano Corona and Queens Collage Yaba in Nigeria before attending Convent of the Holy Family in Littlehampton, Sussex in England.
Career and Works
Tuggar creates images, objects, installations and web-based instructive media artworks. They juxtapose scenes from African and
Western
Western may refer to:
Places
*Western, Nebraska, a village in the US
*Western, New York, a town in the US
*Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western world, countries that id ...
daily life. This draws attention to the process involved and considers gendered subjectivity, belonging, and notions of progress.Fleetwood, Nicole R. ''Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness'' Chapter 5 - Visible Seams: The Media Art of Fatimah Tuggar The University of Chicago Press (2011), p. 179. . Retrieved 5 May 2013.
Materials and themes
Taking inspiration from German Dada and photomontage artists
Hannah Hoch
Hannah or Hanna may refer to:
People, biblical figures, and fictional characters
* Hannah (name), a female given name of Hebrew origin
* Hanna (Arabic name), a family and a male given name of Christian Arab origin
* Hanna (Irish surname), a fam ...
and
John Heartfield
John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld; 19 June 1891 – 26 April 1968) was a 20th century German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. ...
, Tuggar's work incorporates aspects of collage to question power dynamics within dominate visual language. Sourcing photographs she shoots herself and found materials from Western commercials, magazines and archival footage, Tuggar digitally fuses images together to expose erasures in dominant representations of gender, race, geography, domestic labor, technology, and globalized capitalism while re-centering African Diasporic identities.
Tuggar uses technological innovations in her work as both a medium and a method to critique Westerns concepts of linear progress. The objects usually involve some kind of
bricolage
In the arts, ''bricolage'' ( French for "DIY" or "do-it-yourself projects") is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work constructed using mixed media.
The term ''bricolage'' ...
; combining two or more objects from Western Africa and their Western equivalent to talk about electricity, infrastructure, access and the reciprocal influences between technology and cultures. Similarly, her computer montages and video collage works bring together both video and photographs she shoots herself and found materials from commercials, magazines and archival footage. Meaning for Tuggar seems to lie in these juxtapositions which explore how media affects our daily lives. Overall Tuggar's work uses strategies of deconstruction to challenge our perceptions and attachments to accustomed ways of looking. Her body of work conflates ideas about
race
Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to:
* Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species
* Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...
,
gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures ...
and class; disturbing our notions of subjectivity. Her work reflects her multifaceted identity and challenges the idea of a homogeneous Africa.
Digital photomontages
Fatimah Tuggar began making digital photomontages in 1995. Her early works interrogates media representations and Western perspectives of technology and labor by women in Nigeria. ''Spinner and the Spindle'' (1995) and ''Working Woman'' (1997) exemplify her early work using computer montage to digitally fuse images of Western technology with contemporary rural Nigerian women to trouble prominent and simple narratives of contemporary Africa as isolated from Western technology and progress through digital divide. Tuggar use of collage and mise-en-abyme in works such as ''Working Woman'', where the image of the Nigerian woman is repeated endlessly on the computer screen Tuggar has inserted next to her, highlights the complexities of self-representation through production and reproduction in the rise of digital disseminated information. Three of Tuggar's early photomontages, ''Spinner and the Spindle'' (1995), ''Village Spells'' (1996), and ''In Touch'' (1998) were included in a 2002 special edition of ''
Social Text
''Social Text'' is an academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, ''Social Text'' has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gende ...
'' by
Alondra Nelson
Alondra Nelson (born April 22, 1968) is an American policy advisor, non-profit administrator, academic, and writer. She is the Harold F. Linder Chair and Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independen ...
to discuss the recent rise of
Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, and philosophy of science and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technocultu ...
.
''Lady and the Maid'' (2000), ''Bedroom'' (2001), and ''Cake People'' (2001) re-imagine representations of Black women and domestic technologies by inserting African Diasporic narratives and iconography into commercialized White domestic spaces in the mid-twentieth century. Through a lens of Black Female Subjectivity, Tuggar's computer montages question power dynamics of race, gender, and technology through colonialist and consumptive frameworks.
Recent photomontage works by Tuggar include ''Home's Horizons'' (2019), a diptych with an adobe home with a thatched roof and woven fence mirrored above a two-story house with a white picket fence. The second photomontage mirrors a small boat with a spacecraft, both connected by a parachute and water. Using images of thatched roofs and woven fences seen in earlier works such as ''Cake People'' and ''Working Woman'', Tuggar continues to incorporate themes of technology and domestic spaces to examine geographic and cultural liminal spaces as places of both complicity and possibility.
Video and sculptures
Incorporating similar methods of photomontage into video installations, Tuggar's ''Fusion Cuisine'' (2000) co-produced with
The Kitchen
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was foun ...
during her Artist Production Residency, juxtaposes Cold War era American advertisements of domestic technologies targeted toward white American middle-class women and contemporary footage of African women videotaped by the artist in Nigeria. Using and critiquing technology in visual language, ''Fusion Cuisine'' shifts continuously between the archival filmstrips of postwar fantasies of modern life and
suburbia
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area, which may include Commercial area, commercial and mixed-use development, mixed-use, that is primarily a residential area. A suburb can exist either as part of a ...
and images of domestic work and play in Nigeria. ''Fusion Cuisine'' examines dominant visual language in domestic consumer technology through a transnational lens to re-evaluate colonial concepts of progress, exposing the racial and geographic erasures to imagine new visions of the future and visual narratives. Her works comment on potentially sensitive themes such as ethnicity, technology and post-colonial culture. The artist chooses not to extend a didactic message, but rather to elucidate cultural nuances that go beyond obvious cross-cultural comparisons.
Tuggar's sound sculptures continue to incorporate themes of hybridity and technology through physical and conceptual bricolage. Her 1996 sculpture titled ''Turntable'', Tuggar uses raffia discs in place of vinyl records, referencing the ways in which the introduction of the gramophone influenced the development of local language. Because of the physical similarly between the vinyl and fai-fai in many Northern Nigerian languages vinyl record get its name from raffia disc. For instance in
Hausa
Hausa may refer to:
* Hausa people, an ethnic group of West Africa
* Hausa language, spoken in West Africa
* Hausa Kingdoms, a historical collection of Hausa city-states
* Hausa (horse) or Dongola horse, an African breed of riding horse
See also
...
the raffia disc is called fai-fai and vinyl is fai-fain gramophone. ''Turntable'' was lost in 2002 and remade by Tuggar in 2010 under the title ''Fai-Fain Gramophone''. Paying homage to crafted technology used in domestic labor and music, Tuggar highlights versatile tools used by women in Nigeria by incorporating ''fai-fai'' disks, woven by women from raffia, in place of vinyl records. The woven disks spin in emulation of a turntable, while a hidden digital recording of Nigerian musician Barmani Chogo, plays from the sculpture.
Other sound sculptures by Tuggar include ''Broom'' (1996) and ''The Talking Urinal'' (1992) both of which reference Surrealism and
Dada
Dada () or Dadaism was an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century, with early centres in Zürich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire (in 1916). New York Dada began c. 1915, and after 1920 Dada flourished in Pari ...
's questioning of object function and representation.
Augmented reality and web-based work
In her computer montages and video collages, Tuggar brings together images that explore cultural nuances and the different relationships between people and power structures. In her web-based interactive works, participants can create their own collages by selecting animated elements and backgrounds. This process allows participants to construct or disrupt non-linear narratives. ''Changing Space'' (2002), a participatory online exhibition by Tuggar with the
Art Production Fund
Art Production Fund (APF) is a non-profit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code that presents public art throughout the United States. It was founded in 2000 by Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen. it is directed by Casey ...
used audience interaction in a virtual space to question power dynamics of authorship and representation of modern African art in galleries and museums.
Her interactive animated collage "Transient Transfer" allows participants to create collages from scenes in Greensboro in 2011 or the Bronx in 2008 (see Street Art, Street Life: From 1950s to Now " at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York). In her 2006 web project created as part o Rethinking Nordic Colonialism Tuggar "engages the viewer/participant in a potentially loaded power space of making choices, or not choosing. Action or lack of action in this digital environment animates elements to create a dynamic collage. This collage is constructed from: ''Characters'' icons and totems, ''Context'' landscapes and commodities, and ''Behaviors'' actions and interactions between all these elements. This encourages the creation of temporary non-linear narratives, which can be constructed or disrupted based on the choices made by the participant. A key factor is the awareness of choice and the consequences of exercising or choosing not to exercise this potential power."
Continuing concepts of technology, labor, hybridity, and globalized capitalism, Tuggar's recent use of Augmented Reality and
Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that employs pose tracking and 3D near-eye displays to give the user an immersive feel of a virtual world. Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (particularly video games), e ...
in participatory works include ''Desired Dwellings'' (2009) and the commissioned work by The Davis Museum ''Deep Blue Wells'' (2019). ''Deep Blue Wells'' explores the history and contemporary collaborative process and labor of
indigo
Indigo is a deep color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine, based on the ancient dye of the same name. The word "indigo" comes from the Latin word ''indicum'', m ...
dye wells and fabric dyeing in
Kano
Kano may refer to:
Places
*Kano State, a state in Northern Nigeria
* Kano (city), a city in Nigeria, and the capital of Kano State
**Kingdom of Kano, a Hausa kingdom between the 10th and 14th centuries
**Sultanate of Kano, a Hausa kingdom between ...
, and contends with the effects of globalized capitalism.
Exhibitions
Tuggar has shown her work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and at international biennial exhibitions such as the
Moscow Biennale
The Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art is one of the most important Russian cultural events and was founded in 2003.
First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
The First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (January 28 – February 28, 2005) ca ...
Bamako
Bamako ( bm, ߓߡߊ߬ߞߐ߬ ''Bàmakɔ̌'', ff, 𞤄𞤢𞤥𞤢𞤳𞤮 ''Bamako'') is the capital and largest city of Mali, with a 2009 population of 1,810,366 and an estimated 2022 population of 2.81 million. It is located on the Niger Rive ...
Biennal, Mali, 2003. Tuggar's work will be included in the 2023
Sharjah Biennial
The Sharjah Biennial is a large-scale contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in the city of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The first Sharjah Biennial took place in 1993, and was organized by the Sharjah Department of Cul ...
in United Arab Emirates.
Additional exhibitions include:
*2019 ''Fatimah Tuggar: Home's Horizons,'' The Davis Museum at Wellesley College
*2019 ''Charlotte Street Awards Exhibition'',
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum.
Founders
The core of the museum's perm ...
, Kansas City, Missouri
*2019 ''Knowledge'', The
Spencer Museum of Art
The Spencer Museum of Art is an art museum operated by the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, the Spencer Museum seeks to "...present its collection as a living archive that motivates object-c ...
, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
*2017, 2018 ''Flow of Forms/Forms of Flow'', Museum am Rothenbaum, Hamburg, Germany and Kunstraum, Munchen, Germany
*2015 ''Appropriation Art: Finding Meaning in Found-Image Collage'' The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts, Highlands, North Carolina
*2013 ''In/Visible Seams'' Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
*2012 ''Fatimah Tuggar'', Institute for Women and Art, Mary Hana Women Artists Series Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
*2012, 2011, 2010 ''The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl'',
Nasher Museum of Art
The Nasher Museum of Art (previously the Duke University Museum of Art) is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States. The Nasher, along with Dartmouth's Hood Museum of Art and Pr ...
, Duke University and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
*2012 ''Harlem Postcards'', Studio Museum Harlem, New York, NY
*2011 ''Dream Team, Works from 1995-2011'', GreenHill Center for North Carolina Art, Greensboro, North Carolina
*2010 ''One Blithe Day'', Link Media Wall, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
*2009 ''Tell Me Again: A Concise Retrospective'', Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC
*2009 ''Desired Dwellings: Project for an Immersive Virtual Environment'', Duke Immersive Virtual Environment, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
*2009 ''On Screen: Global Intimacy'' Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO
*2005 ''Inna's Recipe'', Indiana Black Expo's Summer Celebration, Cultural Arts Pavilion, Indianapolis, Indiana
*2005 ''Rencontres de Bamako: Biennale Africaine de la Photographie: Telling Time''
*2002 ''Changing Space'',
Art Production Fund
Art Production Fund (APF) is a non-profit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code that presents public art throughout the United States. It was founded in 2000 by Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen. it is directed by Casey ...
, New York, New York
*2002 ''Tempo'', Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York
*2002 ''Africaine: Candice Breitz,
Wangechi Mutu
Wangechi Mutu (born 1972) is a Kenyan-born American visual artist, known primarily for her painting, sculpture, film, and performance work.Tracey Rose, and Fatimah Tuggar'', The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York
*2001 ''Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization'' The Art Gallery of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York
*2000 ''Poetics and Power''
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland
A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...
*2000 ''Crossing the Line''
Queens Museum of Art
The Queens Museum, formerly the Queens Museum of Art, is an art museum and educational center located in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in the borough (New York City), borough of Queens in New York City, United States. The museum was founded in 1 ...
*2000 ''The New World, The Vices and Virtues, Bienal de Valencia, Spain Bienal de Maia, Porto, Portugal
*2000 ''Celebrations'' Galeria Joao Graça, Lisbon, Portugal
*2000 ''At the Water Tap''
Greene Naftali Gallery
Greene Naftali is a contemporary art gallery located in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.
Owner
Carol Greene is an American art dealer and founder of Greene Naftali. She was born and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts, and received a B.A ...
, New York
*2000 ''Tell Me Again'', The Kitchen, New York, New York
*2000 ''Fusion Cuisine'', The Kitchen, New York, New York, Le Musee Chateau, Annecy, France
*2000 ''Fatimah Tuggar'', Art and Public, Geneva, Switzerland
*1999 ''The Passion and the Wave'' 6th International
Istanbul Biennial
The Istanbul Biennial is a contemporary art exhibition that has been held biennially in Istanbul, Turkey, since 1987. The Biennial has been organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) since its inception. Format
Istanbul Bien ...
*1999 ''Beyond Technology: Working in Brooklyn''
Brooklyn Museum of Art
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Cro ...
, New York
*1998 ''Village Spells'' Plexus.org
*1992 ''Revolving Room'', The Founders Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri
*1992 ''Between Space and Light'', Leedy-Volkus Art Center, Kansas City, Missouri