Lina Iris Viktor: Syzygy

Syzygy (2015) is one of several artworks reproduced at scale and displayed externally around our site as part of our summer festivities and in response to the Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic, which Lina Iris Viktor also appears in.

Syzygy is the astronomical term for the exact alignment of the sun, moon, and the earth in a straight line.

Viktor works with a restricted colour palette and the age-old technique of gilding with 24-karat gold.

Using painting, sculpture, performance, installations and photography, she draws on artistic traditions and visual influences from African symbolism and cosmology spanning from the present-day Dogon people of Mali to ancient Egypt, classical mythology and astronomy, and European portraiture.

Viktor says: ‘My interest is to work with patterns, because I believe that the universe is governed by pattern systems, those that are so present in African textiles, which are communicated through inferred knowledge, rather than literal knowledge.’

For Viktor, gold is both substance and symbol, a conduit to spiritual transcendence. The opulent ultramarine blue emulates the ‘blue room’ in the artist's former studio.