Fatimah Tuggar

The Paradox of Domesticity

Dehumanization begins at the tail-end of remembrance. Fatimah Tuggar’s collages are works in which photographs of different places and times are stretched to meet each other. As a collection, they uplift the rallying cry, ‘do not forget, do not forget.’ But what is it that is not to be forgotten? What is it that the memory-keepers must attend to with the ferociousness of a beaver constructing a dam. Is it just the substance of a time called the present and the events that unfold within it, or is it something more, something that eclipses all time? 

In Lyali (Family) (1998), a family portrait is superimposed with another family portrait. In the portrait that is near, there is a mother, a father, and two children [1]. Each child is tucked between the thighs of a parent, one more intimately than the other. You know they are a family not only because of the physical resemblance or the synchrony of the headwrap style—the mother does it for the children in her style—but also because of the gesture of the parental hand. The open palm and the light touch. In the background of this assembled life are portraits of another family. They look familiar, perhaps celebrities. If you know them, you know them. If you do not know them, their suits, ties, white dresses, and pearls invite you to trace the history that places them in another’s living room. Notice that they are duplicates. Two for every one. 

Tuggar’s interest in mimesis, in desire not as envy but as social representation of the real world in art, appears again in Working Woman (1997). Another picture within a picture, except this time, the distance between two images is mediated by a screen [2]. Technology, those gadgets that litter the frame, also transfix the joy of the figure. A mouse is placed into her hand, perhaps as a substitute for her bowl, her mudu, a familiar measure of grains in Nigeria. Tuggar’s fascination with imitative behavior is also a fascination with periods of human history. In this collage, a blue clock and an orange calendar occupy the upper left corner. Just like a lamp and a red designer bag occupy the lower right. At these extremes, Tuggar initiates the question of what we do. We, not as a single society, but as the collective human race, the makers of all things nurtured into existence. What do we make, why do we make them, and who gets access to these finished goods?

In the materialist interpretation of Tuggar’s world, the people and the objects around them are in a push-and-pull relationship. The family in the living room is in opposition to the family that enters the living room through the frame. The woman with the mouse is overwhelmed by the volume of gadgets in front of her. Although these interpretations are legitimate because the things we make always take on a form, and form is frictional to spirit, Tuggar’s vision is much broader than friction. In the last two works, Tuggar shows us a world mediated by memory, the union of matter and spirit. In Lady and the Maid (2000), worlds collide in a living room, two women, one eating, the other cooking [3]. In Nebulous Wait (2005), these worlds are outside, at bus stops, in travel, wheeling [4]. The depth of what happens in these collages can only be experienced and not described. Look at the colors, the flatware, the suitcase, the ice cream stand. Look at acts of standing and sitting, who is doing it, when, and how they are doing it.

Through all this looking, Tuggar offers us a world where who we are is defined not in opposition to the other, the stranger, but rather as an essence captured by the breadth of our memory, of what we remember about our time here on earth. In this world, home is where we remember it to be, and for those whose memories are scattered, challenged by the currents of violence, this is the paradox. They must carry home with them, placing their histories in the delicate crevices of the lives they struggle to make, hoping that random acts of domesticity will undo all the ways their dehumanization began and continues, their memories deluged with catastrophe. Do not forget. Do not forget. Do not forget how to make home. 

[1,2,3,4] All images excerpted from here.