Victoria-Idongesit Udondian
Lagos/New York
October 2 - 31 , 2020 -Virtually
Sponsored by The Shepard Broad Foundation, this month’s residency welcomes U.S.-based foreign-born artists.
BIO
Udondian’s work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. She engages with repurposed materials to question how fundamental changes in a fabric can affect one’s perception of identity. Her works have been exhibited internationally in Lagos, Venice, New York, UK etc. this include, The Inaugural Nigerian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial-An Excerpt, Fisher Landau Centre for the Arts, New York; The Children Museum of Manhattan, New york; National Museum, Lagos; Whitworth Gallery in Manchester etc. Some of her Artist Residencies include, Instituto Sacatar, Bahia, Brazil; Mass Moca, Massachusetts, USA; Fine Arts Work Centre (FAWC), Provincetown; USA; Fondazione di Venezia, Venice and Bag Factory Studios, Johannesburg. Udondian received an MFA in Sculpture and New Genres from Columbia University, New York and a BA in painting from the University of Uyo, Nigeria.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work is driven by my interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. I engage with repurposed material to investigate how fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of his or her identity, and ultimately a nation’s psyche.
Coming from Nigeria, a country flooded with cast-off from the West, I begin to explore, using the second- hand clothing industry as a starting point. I question the impact the cast-off clothing market has had on the West African textile industry and how the local consumption of foreign-made goods has impacted our cultural identity. I am interested in the materiality as well as the historicity of the second-hand clothing with which I work: how it travels the world from the West to the Global South, carrying the personal as well as social histories of the people involved in this economy, and how those histories begin to be complicated when others acquire the clothing and wear it. I explore this further by creating costumes or hybrid garments that weaves traditional Nigerian and Western myths and narratives together. These costumes get activated with bodies through still photos, performances or sometimes function as sculptural forms.
Confronting notions of “authenticity” and “cultural contamination,” I work with large-scale sculptural forms and installations utilizing second-hand textiles as the primary material. My process involves sourcing scrap from tailors; collecting used burlap, paper, plastic bags and other recycled materials; as well as shopping and collecting used clothes from various marketplaces or textile recycling companies. I re‐purpose these materials to construct large sculptural elements, room-size installation pieces or hybridized clothing, using techniques ranging from cutting, weaving, tying, threading, sewing, tailoring, dyeing and printing which I learnt naturally while growing up.
My works are often presented with an accompanying fictional historical context, in the form of a written narrative, a label. The text tells a historically plausible narrative, placing my work alongside a retelling of facts about Nigerian weaving, the patterns of the European clothing trade, anthropology, and colonialism, involving notions of provenance, origin and historical fact.
Recently, I have begun exploring exhibition-wide conceits in which, for example, I limit viewers’ access to a gallery via a simulated immigration interview or produce and exhibit works by my alter egos or fictional Nigerian artists. I am interested in how these strategies change the ways that viewers interpret the objects they encounter, or in some cases, do not encounter. In traversing gallery spaces, who has access to which materials? when and under what circumstances? Controlled by whom and to whose benefit? Neither the conceptual framework nor the physical works seek to resolve these questions, but rather point to how we construct our identities, and how they determine our interactions with one another and our surroundings.