Born in Nigeria in 1967, multimedia artist Fatimah Tuggar interrogates the systems underlying human interactions with both high-tech gadgets and handmade crafts. Now based in Kansas City, Tuggar is renowned for her work that layers binary code with handmade craft, and her sculptures, photomontages, videos, and interactive works challenge romanticized notions of both ancient traditions and recent inventions.
In this book, a foreword by Lisa Fischman and essays by Amanda Gilvin, Delinda Collier, Nicole Fleetwood, and Jennifer Bajorek address Tuggar’s oeuvre within the confluence of the histories of conceptual, tech, and African art. As the authors show, Tuggar seeks through her work to promote social justice by implicating everyone in these systems of high-tech and handmade while playfully proposing new ways of seeing and making. Her work destabilizes the attachment to a single city, nation, or continent as a “home” in a world of migrants who may move between different kinds of home. This beautifully illustrated book also contains an interview with the artist, during which she reflects on the resonance of her early works and the goals of her new experiments in augmented reality.
Published to accompany Tuggar’s first major solo exhibition at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Fatimah Tuggar is the initial book to explore the work of one of the most original, incisive conceptual artists of the digital age.
