Fatimah Tuggar: Home's Horizons

Renowned for work that layers binary code with handmade craft, Fatimah Tuggar is one of the most original, incisive conceptual artists of the digital age. Tuggar’s sculp-tures, photomontages, videos, and interactive works challenge roman-ticized notions of both ancient traditions and recent inventions.

Born in Nigeria and based in Kansas City, multimedia artist Fatimah Tuggar (b. 1967) interrogates the systems underlying human interactions with both high-tech gadgets and handmade crafts. She seeks to promote social justice by implicating everyone in these systems, 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 homes. The essays here address Tuggar’s œuvre within the confluence of the histories of conceptual art, tech art, and African art. In an interview with curator Amanda Gilvin, the artist reflects on the resonance of her early works and the goals of her new experiments in Augmented Reality (AR).