Lina Iris Viktor’s Diviner sculptures are inspired by Akan and Dogon West African sculptural traditions, and they signify the artist’s pursuit of pushing the physical possibilities of spiritual conductors. They are vessels for stories and secrets that invite and reflect human communication.
Viktor authors an idiosyncratic mythology that threads through deep time, knitting together a diasporic past with an expansive present in order to divine future imaginaries. The artist’s use of gold is partly inspired by ancient Egyptian funerary traditions, in which the precious metal was meant to serve as a conduit between heaven and earth. Within Viktor’s cosmology, black as matter and as colour plays the lead role of materia prima or the primordial source of life, both a provocation and a challenge to the sociopolitical and historical preconceptions surrounding ‘blackness’ and its universal implications.