Fatimah Tuggar

Fatimah Tuggar (born 15 August 1967) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States. Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigate dominant and linear narratives of gender, race, and technology. She is currently an associate professor of AI in the Arts: Art & Global Equity at the University of Florida in the United States.

Early life and education Tuggar was born in Kaduna, Nigeria, in 1967. Tuggar studied at Blackheath School of Art in London, England, and received a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in the United States in 1992. She completed her MFA in sculpture at Yale University in 1995, and conducted a one-year postgraduate independent study at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1995 to 1996. She also attended Kano Corona and Queens College Yaba in Nigeria before attending Convent of the Holy Family in Littlehampton, Sussex in England.

Career and Works

Tuggar creates images, objects, installations and web-based instructive media artworks. They juxtapose scenes from African and Western daily life. This draws attention to the process involved and considers gendered subjectivity, belonging, and notions of progress.

Materials and themes Taking inspiration from German Dada and photomontage artists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield, Tuggar's work incorporates aspects of collage to question power dynamics within dominate visual language. disturbing our notions of subjectivity. Her work reflects her multifaceted identity and challenges the idea of a homogeneous Africa.

Digital photomontages Fatimah Tuggar began making digital photomontages in 1995. Her early works interrogates media representations and Western perspectives of technology and labor by women in Nigeria. Spinner and the Spindle (1995) and Working Woman (1997) exemplify her early work using computer montage to digitally fuse images of Western technology with contemporary rural Nigerian women to trouble prominent and simple narratives of contemporary Africa as isolated from Western technology and progress through digital divide. Tuggar uses raffia discs in place of vinyl records, referencing the ways in which the introduction of the gramophone influenced the development of local language. Because of the physical similarly between the vinyl and fai-fai in many Northern Nigerian languages vinyl record get its name from raffia disc. For instance in Hausa the raffia disc is called fai-fai and vinyl is fai-fain gramophone. Turntable was lost in 2002 and remade by Tuggar in 2010 under the title Fai-Fain Gramophone. Paying homage to crafted technology used in domestic labor and music, Tuggar highlights versatile tools used by women in Nigeria by incorporating fai-fai disks, woven by women from raffia, in place of vinyl records. Action or lack of action in this digital environment animates elements to create a dynamic collage. This collage is constructed from: Characters icons and totems, Context landscapes and commodities, and Behaviors actions and interactions between all these elements. This encourages the creation of temporary non-linear narratives, which can be constructed or disrupted based on the choices made by the participant. A key factor is the awareness of choice and the consequences of exercising or choosing not to exercise this potential power." 2013 In/Visible Seams Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 2012 Fatimah Tuggar, Institute for Women and Art, Mary Hana Women Artists Series Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 2012, 2011, 2010 The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 2005 Rencontres de Bamako: Biennale Africaine de la Photographie: Telling Time 2002 Changing Space, Art Production Fund, New York, New York 2001 Empire/State: Artists Engaging Globalization The Art Gallery of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York 2000 Poetics and Power Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland 2000 Crossing the Line Queens Museum of Art 2000 The New World, The Vices and Virtues, Bienal de Valencia, Spain Bienal de Maia, Porto, Portugal 2000 Celebrations Galeria Joao Graça, Lisbon, Portugal 2000 At the Water Tap Greene Naftali Gallery, New York 2000 Tell Me Again, The Kitchen, New York, New York 2000 Fusion Cuisine, The Kitchen, New York, New York, Le Musee Chateau, Annecy, France 2000 Fatimah Tuggar, Art and Public, Geneva, Switzerland 1999 The Passion and the Wave 6th International Istanbul Biennial 1999 Beyond Technology: Working in Brooklyn Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York 1998 Village Spells Plexus.org 1992 Revolving Room, The Founders Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri 1992 Between Space and Light, Leedy-Volkus Art Center, Kansas City, Missouri