Wellesley College’s Davis Museum currently features a special solo exhibition on the work Nigerian-born artist Fatimah Tuggar. The 52 year-old artists’s Home’s Horizons explores the relationships between history, technology, and the home.
The exhibit combines a series of sculptures, photo-montages, videos, and augmented reality installations. Tuggar’s 26 works explore the past and present of home technologies, featuring both high-tech gadgets and handmade craftwork.
Tuggar’s pieces aim to question and expand the concept of the home, uprooting it from a specific continent or city. Rather, the homes are tethered to the horizon.
Fatimah Tuggar Links the Digital and Artisinal
The theme of technology has pervaded the Kansas-based conceptual artist’s work since her rise to prominence in the late 1990s.
While the works in Home’s Horizons focus on home as the primary space, her famous 1997 photo-montage Working Woman depicts a woman in traditional Nigerian clothing sitting on the floor, surrounded by contemporary office gadgets – a juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary imagery that Tuggar frequently explores. Similarly, her 2000 work, Fusion Cuisine, explores connections among historical and present notions of technology and progress.
Fatimah Tuggar’s “Working Woman”
In Home’s Horizons, Tuggar combines advanced technologies such as augmented reality with traditionally crafted artisanal works. She draws parallels between the pursuit of technological advancements and colonialism, and her work offers critical views on how the drive for more advanced technologies impacts labor markets.
Fusing Modern and Ancient, Western and African
Tuggar’s artistic approach has led some to characterize her as a “witness” of “how existing and emerging technoscapes reconstitute the meaning of gender, race, and subjectivity.”
Tuggar has exhibited work featuring this characteristic perspective internationally, after graduating from Kansas City Art Institute in 1992 and completing a MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1995. Later she reached the position of Artist in Residence at the Kansas institute, and became a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019.
Fatimah Tuggar on Authenticity
Playfully responding to critics who comment that her use of technology is “not African enough for people” or “authenticat[ing] [her] Africanness,” Tuggar asks, “what would make it more African? Mud, hay, you know? Sticks?”
“I use those,” Tuggar continues. “But I also use other things. My position is that all making is technological, and so, I don’t really make a distinction between a hammer and a computer.” She says that her goal is to “explore the diverse effects of power dynamics.”
For more information on the exhibit, see here. View a selection of some of Tuggar’s work here.
