Fatimah Tuggar
Tuggar's work has been widely exhibited at international venues in over 30 countries on five continents, showcasing the unbroken consistency and breadth of her impact. These include the 60th Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, US; Museum Kunst-Palast, Dusseldorf, Germany; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the 24th Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Moscow Biennale in Russia; the V Salon CANTV Jovenes, Caracas, Venezuela, the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Kwangju Biennale, South Korea; Bamako Biennale, Mali; and the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa. She has received multiple awards, including W. A. Mellon Research and Guggenheim Creative Arts Fellowships. Fatimah Tuggar's latest immersive work is currently at the Power Plant in Toronto, Ontario.
Spinner and the Spindle: Tuning Meaning & Threading Ideas
April 5 to May 3 (Capture Photo Festival Select Exhibitions)
Spinner and the Spindle exhibits a sampling of computer montages by Fatimah Tuggar from the 1990s and an augmented reality diptych from 2019. The exhibition also features "Broom," a sculptural object with an electronic embedded sound, demonstrating her collage and bricolage consistency in all mediums.
Interdisciplinary artist Tuggar, a pioneer of digital media, combines her photographs and found images from multiple histories, geographies, and cultures to closely examine societal nuances. She recontextualises: exploring, documenting and reimagining what connects us and separates us, as well as the spaces within us and around us. As put by ARTBYTE in 1998, "It seems a radical shift from the social space of Madame Yevonde in 1930s London to that of Fatimah Tuggar." In both her computer montages and video collages, meaning is located between the combined elements, with a focus on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures.
Tuggar combines images, perspectives, characters, contexts and personas in a provocative and respectful practice of engaging ideas and viewers in an ongoing dialogue. The thematic threads of her visual conversations with us interconnects the factual and fictional; with the intention of implicating us. We are both audiences and agents in things as they have been, global society as it is, and the world as it could be. The images in this show highlight her continuous paradoxical uses of humour, reverence, fragility and complexity, which are consistent as connecting energies regardless of the medium or methods she's working in. Even these early static images are also spaces of dynamic unfolding reflection, just like the more recent AR (Augmented Reality) images and immersive installations.
The false binaries within art, including the distinction between 'high and low, art and tech,' are subverted by this work. Tuggar bridges and contrasts cultures, borders, eras, and vernaculars as an aesthetically witty challenge to our misperceptions and misconceptions, including her own. It's also a friendly invitation into a broader humanity of those often misrepresented or invisible. Yet, her work is not about the "...fetish of ethnicity" or an exaltation of domesticity; it's affirmatively about "...the interdependence of humanity". This work is an invitation into a shared space with the explicit possibilities of access without prerequisites or preconditions.
Tuggar's hybrid media, multi-medium practice (images, performance, video, installation, sculptural, and digital interactive artworks) spans three decades of investigating the impact of technology on culture. For her, all making is technological, and all technology is both cultural and political. Technology is both a medium and a subject in her work. She uses it as a metaphor for power dynamics to explore how it diversely impacts our realities.
Her objects combine household tools from different cultures with their varying counterparts to examine the juggling implications that occur as we adapt, modify, and are modified by the implements and systems that define our time and space. Tuggar's interactive installations, which are physical, virtual, and web-based, engage the audience and make them active participants in her exploration of West African technologies and XR (extended realities): multiple forms, multiple realities, and unifying ideas. A distillation of these decades-spanning themes is on playful and vibrant display in this selection of images.
Interdisciplinary artist Tuggar, a pioneer of digital media, combines her photographs and found images from multiple histories, geographies, and cultures to closely examine societal nuances. She recontextualises: exploring, documenting and reimagining what connects us and separates us, as well as the spaces within us and around us. As put by ARTBYTE in 1998, "It seems a radical shift from the social space of Madame Yevonde in 1930s London to that of Fatimah Tuggar." In both her computer montages and video collages, meaning is located between the combined elements, with a focus on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures.
Tuggar combines images, perspectives, characters, contexts and personas in a provocative and respectful practice of engaging ideas and viewers in an ongoing dialogue. The thematic threads of her visual conversations with us interconnects the factual and fictional; with the intention of implicating us. We are both audiences and agents in things as they have been, global society as it is, and the world as it could be. The images in this show highlight her continuous paradoxical uses of humour, reverence, fragility and complexity, which are consistent as connecting energies regardless of the medium or methods she's working in. Even these early static images are also spaces of dynamic unfolding reflection, just like the more recent AR (Augmented Reality) images and immersive installations.
The false binaries within art, including the distinction between 'high and low, art and tech,' are subverted by this work. Tuggar bridges and contrasts cultures, borders, eras, and vernaculars as an aesthetically witty challenge to our misperceptions and misconceptions, including her own. It's also a friendly invitation into a broader humanity of those often misrepresented or invisible. Yet, her work is not about the "...fetish of ethnicity" or an exaltation of domesticity; it's affirmatively about "...the interdependence of humanity". This work is an invitation into a shared space with the explicit possibilities of access without prerequisites or preconditions.
Tuggar's hybrid media, multi-medium practice (images, performance, video, installation, sculptural, and digital interactive artworks) spans three decades of investigating the impact of technology on culture. For her, all making is technological, and all technology is both cultural and political. Technology is both a medium and a subject in her work. She uses it as a metaphor for power dynamics to explore how it diversely impacts our realities.
Her objects combine household tools from different cultures with their varying counterparts to examine the juggling implications that occur as we adapt, modify, and are modified by the implements and systems that define our time and space. Tuggar's interactive installations, which are physical, virtual, and web-based, engage the audience and make them active participants in her exploration of West African technologies and XR (extended realities): multiple forms, multiple realities, and unifying ideas. A distillation of these decades-spanning themes is on playful and vibrant display in this selection of images.
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