Fatimah Tuggar

Fatimah Tuggar (born 15 August 1967) is a interdisciplinary artist born in Nigeria and based in the United States.

Tuggar uses collage and digital technology to create works that investigates 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.

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 Collage Yaba in Nigeria before attending Convent of the Holy Family in Littlehampton, Sussex in England.

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.

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.

Sourcing photographs she shoots herself and found materials from Western commercials, magazines and archival footage, Tuggar digitally fuses images together to expose erasures in dominant representations of gender, race, geography, domestic labor, technology, and globalized capitalism while re-centering African Diasporic identities.

Tuggar uses technological innovations in her work as both a medium and a method to critique Westerns concepts of linear progress.

The objects usually involve some kind of bricolage; combining two or more objects from Western Africa and their Western equivalent to talk about electricity, infrastructure, access and the reciprocal influences between technology and cultures.

Similarly, her computer montages and video collage works bring together both video and photographs she shoots herself and found materials from commercials, magazines and archival footage.

Meaning for Tuggar seems to lie in these juxtapositions which explore how media affects our daily lives.

Overall Tuggar's work uses strategies of deconstruction to challenge our perceptions and attachments to accustomed ways of looking.

Her body of work conflates ideas about race, gender and class; disturbing our notions of subjectivity.

Her work reflects her multifaceted identity and challenges the idea of a homogeneous Africa.

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 use of collage and mise-en-abyme in works such as Working Woman, where the image of the Nigerian woman is repeated endlessly on the computer screen Tuggar has inserted next to her, highlights the complexities of self-representation through production and reproduction in the rise of digital disseminated information.

Three of Tuggar's early photomontages, Spinner and the Spindle (1995), Village Spells (1996), and In Touch (1998) were included in a 2002 special edition of Social Text by Alondra Nelson to discuss the recent rise of Afrofuturism.

Her 1996 sculpture titled Turntable, 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.

Lady and the Maid (2000), Bedroom (2001), and Cake People (2001) re-imagine representations of Black women and domestic technologies by inserting African Diasporic narratives and iconography into commercialized White domestic spaces in the mid-twentieth century.

Through a lens of Black Female Subjectivity, Tuggar's computer montages question power dynamics of race, gender, and technology through colonialist and consumptive frameworks.

Incorporating similar methods of photomontage into video installations, Tuggar's Fusion Cuisine (2000) co-produced with The Kitchen during her Artist Production Residency, juxtaposes Cold War era American advertisements of domestic technologies targeted toward white American middle-class women and contemporary footage of African women videotaped by the artist in Nigeria.

Using and critiquing technology in visual language, Fusion Cuisine shifts continuously between the archival filmstrips of postwar fantasies of modern life and suburbia and images of domestic work and play in Nigeria.

Fusion Cuisine examines dominant visual language in domestic consumer technology through a transnational lens to re-evaluate colonial concepts of progress, exposing the racial and geographic erasures to imagine new visions of the future and visual narratives.

Her works comment on potentially sensitive themes such as ethnicity, technology and post-colonial culture.

The artist chooses not to extend a didactic message, but rather to elucidate cultural nuances that go beyond obvious cross-cultural comparisons.

Tuggar's sound sculptures continue to incorporate themes of hybridity and technology through physical and conceptual bricolage.

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.

Recent photomontage works by Tuggar include Home's Horizons (2019), a diptych with an adobe home with a thatched roof and woven fence mirrored above a two-story house with a white picket fence.

The second photomontage mirrors a small boat with a spacecraft, both connected by a parachute and water.

Using images of thatched roofs and woven fences seen in earlier works such as Cake People and Working Woman, Tuggar continues to incorporate themes of technology and domestic spaces to examine geographic and cultural liminal spaces as places of both complicity and possibility.