Fatimah Tuggar

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Born in Nigeria and now based in New York City, Fatimah Tuggar completed her MFA at Yale University in 1992. Since she has shown her work in major group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and international biennial exhibitions such as the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005), Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2005), Paris and the Bamako Biennal, Mali, 2003. She has received numerous grants from distinguished institutions such as The Rema Mann Hort Foundation of New York, the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and The Wheeler Foundation, Brooklyn. Tuggar’s body of work includes objects, images, video and interactive media installations. Collage and assemblage seem to figure into all of her creations with a focus often on Western and some West African Cultures. 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 lie in these juxtapositions which explore how media affects our daily lives. Overall Tuggar’s work using strategies of deconstruction to challenge our perceptions and attachments to accustomed ways of looking. The body of work conflates ideas about race, gender and class; disturbing our notions of subjectivity.

The artist creates alluring digital photomontages that juxtapose scenes from African and American daily life. Her art turns the attention to the process and labor involved in constructing visual knowledge about gendered subjectivity, belonging, and notions of progress. Tuggar’s media art relies heavily on computer-based technologies and image manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop and AfterEffects. Her process uses the medium to comment on the medium itself; thus, she employs technology as form and content to express and analyze its significance in the creation of current economic, cultural, and geographic systems.

Her works comment on potentially sensitive themes such as ethnicity, technology and post-colonial culture, although the artist chooses not to extend a didactic message, but rather to elucidate cultural nuances that go beyond obvious cross-cultural comparison.

Specifically, the artist’s work illustrates how these issues coalesce through visual representational practices such as television commercials, Hollywood film, and product design. Fusion Cuisine, coproduced with the Kitchen (an experimental nonprofit arts center in New York), playfully reveals cold-war American fantasies of consumer technology as gendered emancipation and national progress while exposing the racial and geographic erasures that form the basis of these visions of the future. The video consists of two sets of footage: post–WorldWar II American commercials advertising domestic technologies and targeted toward white American middle-class women and contemporary footage of African women videotaped by the artist in Nigeria. Fusion Cuisine shifts continuously between the archival filmstrips of postwar fantasies of modern life and suburbia and more recent images of domestic work and play in Nigeria.

• 2002 Changing Space, Art Production Fund, New York, Web Project (Solo)
• 2002 Video Room, Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland (Solo)
• 2002 The Avram Gallery, Southampton Collage, Long Island University, US (Solo)
• 2001 Tempo, Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
• 2001 Empire/State: Artist Engaging Globalization, Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program
• 2001 Africaine, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, US
• 2000 A Work in Progress, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US
• 2000 Poetics and Power, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, US
• 2000 Crossing the Line, Queens Museum of Art, New York, US
• 2000 The New World, The Vices and Virtues, Bienal de Valencia, Spain Bienal da Maia 2001, Porto, Portugal
• 2000 Celebrations, Galeria Joao Graça, Lisboa, Portugal (Solo)
• 2000 At the Water Tap, Greene Naftali Gallery , New York, US (Solo)
• 2000 Fusion Cuisine, Le Musee Chateau, Annecy, France, “Fusion Cuisine”, Screening (Solo)
• 2000 Fusion Cuisine & Tell Me Again, The Kitchen , New York, US, Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland (Solo)
• 1999 The Passion and The Wave, 6th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul
• 1999 Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, US, “Beyond Technology”
• 1998 Village Spells, Plexus.org (Solo)

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6. Conveyance. 2001. Directed by Fatimah Tuggar. New York: BintaZarah Studios.
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19. The Lady and the Maid. 2000. Directed by Fatimah Tuggar. New York: BintaZarah Studios.
20. Meditation on Vacation. 2002. Directed by Fatimah Tuggar. New York: Museum of Moden Art.
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26. Robo Makes Dinner. 2000. Directed by Fatimah Tuggar. New York: Binta Zarah Studios.
27. Scenes from the Micro-War. 1985. Directed by Sherry Milner. Chicago: Video Data Bank.
28. Semiotics of the Kitchen. 1975. Directed by Martha Rosler. Video short. New York:Electronic Arts Intermix.
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31. Spigel, Lynn. 1992. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
32. Suburbia. 1998. Directed by Fatimah Tuggar. New York: BintaZarah Studios.Tranberg, Dan. 2001.
33. Works on Feminist Theme Reflect Individual Visions.Cleveland Plain Dealer, Art and Life sec., E1.
34. Tuggar, Fatimah. Fusion Cuisine. Unpublished artists’s statement, the Kitchen, New York. 2000.

• Fatimah Tuggar Interview
• Fatimah Tuggar on Mutualart
• Fatimah Tuggar on Public Art Fund