Udondian, Victoria
Victoria Udondian
African, (born 1982-)
About the Artist
My work is driven by my interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. I engage with repurposed material to investigate how fundamental changes in fabric can affect one’s perception of his or her identity, and ultimately a nation’s psyche.
Coming from Nigeria, a country flooded with cast-off from the West, I began to explore, using the second-hand clothing industry as a starting point. I question how cast-off clothing and local consumption of foreign-made goods has impacted our cultural identity. I am interested in the materiality as well as the historicity of the second-hand clothing with which I work: how it travels the world from the West to the Global South, carrying the personal as well as social histories of the people involved in this economy, and how those histories begin to be complicated when others acquire the clothing and wear it. I explore this further by creating costumes or hybrid garments that weave traditional Nigerian and Western myths and narratives together. These costumes function as sculptural forms or get activated with bodies through still photos, or sometimes performances.
Works
Exhibitions
coming soon…
