Volk Gallery is proud to present the work of Kialy Tihngang. Each Volk artist is given a size limit and budget and left to their own devices. With this brief, Tihngang has produced a series Top Trump-style trading cards presented in plastic sleeves reminiscent of those used by rabid collectors. Said series reflects Tihngang’s graduate work entitled ‘Useless Machines’: a series of interlocking panels, wrapped in waste-fabrics and a moving image piece advertising them. It forms a darkly humorous response to electronic waste dumping, a neocolonialist practice that increasingly affects African countries. Each scanned card reveals a GIF version of each design.
Artist's Statement
Kialy Tihngang is a Glasgow-based multidisciplinary artist and visual activist working in textiles, sculpture, moving image, costume and animation. She interrogates personal themes of Blackness and queerness through her practice, which is concerned with designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures. She is particularly interested in the colonial misrepresentation and extraction of African cultures, drawing from her own experiences as a British-born Cameroonian.
Tihngang graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s Textile Design programme in 2021, winning its Newbery Medal for best graduating project with her body of work, ‘Useless Machines’: a series of moving interlocking laser cut wooden panels, wrapped in waste-fabrics and hand-stitched, and a moving image piece advertising them. It forms a darkly humorous response to electronic waste dumping, a neocolonialist practice that increasingly affects African countries. ‘Useless Machines’ was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and QUAD (Derby)’s ‘Play During The Pandemic’, as well as being shortlisted in ARTS THREAD x Gucci Global Design Graduate Show and Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre’s The Next Thing Moving Image Award
In 2023, Tihngang will create new textiles, sculpture, and moving image work for solo exhibitions at Quench Gallery (Margate) and God’s House Tower (Southampton), and research a stop motion embroidery animated film about queer Cameroonian identity with development funding from Puppet Animation Scotland.
Exhibition Dates
April 8th 2023 - May 5th 2023
April 8th 2023 - May 5th 2023
Previous Works ↓
