Fatimah Tuggar

[5][6][7] She completed her MFA in sculpture at Yale University in 1995, and conducted a one-year postgraduate independent study at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1995 to 1996.

[9] Taking inspiration from German Dada and photomontage artists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield, Tuggar's work incorporates aspects of collage to question power dynamics within dominate visual language.

[10][11] Sourcing photographs she shoots herself and found materials from Western commercials, magazines and archival footage, Tuggar digitally fuses images together to expose erasures in dominant representations of gender, race, geography, domestic labor, technology, and globalized capitalism while re-centering African Diasporic identities.

[10][11] Three of Tuggar's early photomontages, Spinner and the Spindle (1995), Village Spells (1996), and In Touch (1998) were included in a 2002 special edition of Social Text by Alondra Nelson to discuss the recent rise of Afrofuturism.

[9][12] Through a lens of Black Female Subjectivity, Tuggar's computer montages question power dynamics of race, gender, and technology through colonialist and consumptive frameworks.

[10] Incorporating similar methods of photomontage into video installations, Tuggar's Fusion Cuisine (2000) co-produced with The Kitchen during her Artist Production Residency, juxtaposes Cold War era American advertisements of domestic technologies targeted toward white American middle-class women and contemporary footage of African women videotaped by the artist in Nigeria.

Using and critiquing technology in visual language, Fusion Cuisine shifts continuously between the archival filmstrips of postwar fantasies of modern life and suburbia and images of domestic work and play in Nigeria.

Her 1996 sculpture titled Turntable,[15] Tuggar uses raffia discs in place of vinyl records, referencing the ways in which the introduction of the gramophone influenced the development of local language.

[3][7] The woven disks spin in emulation of a turntable, while a hidden digital recording of Nigerian musician Barmani Chogo, plays from the sculpture.

[7] In her computer montages and video collages, Tuggar brings together images that explore cultural nuances and the different relationships between people and power structures.

In her 2006 web project, Triad Raid, created as part of Rethinking Nordic Colonialism, Tuggar "engages the viewer/participant in a potentially loaded power space of making choices, or not choosing.