“It’s about experience and worldliness and understanding that there is no center.” Lina Iris Viktor’s Painting in a Global Context

Contemporary artists, both in Africa and outside the continent, incorporate decades of critical thinking about the potentials of art into their work, discussing the idea of the continent itself as well as its global entanglements.

Through Lina Iris Viktor's practice, in which she interweaves abstraction and figuration, with a performative treatment of the self, pictorial traditions and narratives in painting can be discussed that do not follow a Western master narrative. Viktor is one of several artists who do not simply intend to introduce non-Western pictorial traditions into art history, but to reveal exclusivist tendencies in art history, to discuss Afro-diasporic identities in their transculturality, and to construct new realities in their art in order to counteract racism and social inequalities. The focus is on the question of how the artist, especially in the medium of painting, discusses different traditions and narratives of pictoriality starting from a postcolonial perspective. Abstraction and figuration are not thought of as a binary model here but relate to each other. Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, for example, have already focused on practices that deal with abstraction in order to discuss an African modernity that creates visual counter-designs while questioning colonial forms of representation. (Okwui Enwezor, Chika-Okeke Agulu, 2009)

It will be argued that through the art of Lina Iris Viktor, entangled global (art) histories can be discussed from a decolonial perspective and thus, the role of painting in the context of multiple modernities can be critically examined from the perspective of contemporary art.