Meet June’s Artists in Residence
Adama Delphine Fawundu, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky and Victoria Udondian
This month’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz and Sustainable Arts Foundation.
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Adama Delphine Fawundu’s artistic practice is rooted in African-centered ontologies that challenge Westernized values of constructed social hierarchies based on race, gender, and class. Over the past decade, her work has evolved from traditional photography to a multidisciplinary practice; she uses photography, video, assemblage, installation, and sound to weave together themes such as memory, migration, identity, place, space, and the imaginary. Her diverse West African heritage (Mende, Krim, Bubi, Bamileke) and lineage within the Black Atlas serves as inspiration for her research. She uses collage methods to piece together imagery, sound and materials from specific cultures and spaces to create new visual and auditory languages. Her body is the focus of most of the works as it represents a universal body.
Historical and cultural symbols like water, cotton, hair, and cowrie shells are consistent in Fawundu’s work, and she contemplates the natural landscape and a natural care for the earth. Fawundu’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, El Museo del Barrio in New York and at Project for Empty Space in Newark. She is an associate professor of photography at Colombia University in New York, where she currently lives and works.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
As a woman of Ecuadorian and Jewish-American ancestry, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky was raised traveling back and forth from the U.S. and Ecuador. Her grandmother lived with her; she spoke no English. Her father never learned Spanish. These experiences led her to focus on personal narratives in her art practice as an entry point to navigate broader questions of place, identity and nationhood. Skvirsky tells stories through images, static or moving, often using performance to ground them. Her influences represent a broad swath of interests that include abstraction, politics, feminism and history. Her multiple ethnicities offer access to explore histories of the African diaspora, the complexities of indigeneity and the legacies of colonialism. By calling into question how we understand history and the elusive nature of truth, her work reveals the subjectivity of both.
Skvirsky’s work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo shows at Museo de la Ciudad in Equador, Photoville at The Clemente in New York, and Museo Amparo in Mexico. In 2019, she was awarded an Anonymous Was A Woman grant, a Creative Capital award, and a grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement. She is a 2015 Fulbright Scholar. She currently lives and works in New York.
Victoria Udondian
Victoria Udondian’s work is driven by her interest in textiles and the potential for clothing to shape identity, informed by the histories and tacit meanings embedded in everyday materials. She engages 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 - Udondian uses second-hand clothing industry as a starting point. She questions how cast-off clothing and local consumption of foreign-made goods has impacted the local cultural identity. She creates costumes or hybrid garments that weave traditional Nigerian and Western myths and narratives together. These costumes are activated with bodies through still photos, performances or sculptural forms. Her work often combines traditional craft practices like weaving, threading, sewing, and dyeing. Her works are often presented with an accompanying fictional historical context, in the form of a written label. The text tells a historically plausible narrative, placing her work alongside a retelling of facts about Nigerian weaving, the patterns of the European clothing trade, anthropology, and colonialism.
Udondian’s work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon in New York, the Bronx Museum and internationally in Lagos, Brazil and Switzerland, among others. She is a past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work has appeared in Artsy and the Art Newspaper. Udondian currently lives and works in New York.
