Creatives in Conversation: Lina Iris Viktor and Natasha Becker

Lina Iris Viktor is a Liberian-British conceptual artist, painter, and performance artist. 

In her artistic practice, Viktor often deploys herself as the sole performer in a meticulously crafted cosmology. Her works are a merging of painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, along with the practice of water gilding with 24-karat gold to create increasingly dark canvases embedded with “layers of light.” Viktor regards these dark canvases to be “light-works” and creates her own linguistic and visual mythology known as “[a] notion of unruly visual pleasure as a politics for refusal.” 

Her works are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide. 

Natasha Becker was born in South Africa and has spent the last sixteen years living and working between Cape Town and New York. An expert in contemporary African and African American art, she has curated a number of exhibitions in collaboration with artists, curators, collectors, galleries, museums, and foundations in South Africa and the United States.   

Becker is an independent curator and one of the co-founders of ASSEMBLY ROOM, a curatorial platform for art and advocacy in New York. Her curatorial work is focused on bringing visibility to contemporary artists from the global African Diaspora.   

She also serves as the Curator of African Art at the de Young Museum.