Statement

“My name is Kialy Tihngang, and I am a Glasgow-based interdisciplinary artist and designer, working across textiles, sculpture, moving image, and costume. I interrogate themes of personal identity – typically Blackness and queerness – from ambiguous and absurd angles, reimagining old histories and speculating on new ones. Afropresentism, retrofuturism, obsolete technologies, and anachronistic advertisements inform my practice.

My most significant body of work is ‘Useless Machines’ (2021). It is a series of moving interlocking laser cut wooden sculptures, wrapped in waste fabrics and hand-stitched, and a single-channel video ‘advertising’ the sculptures, as a darkly humorous response to electronic waste dumping (a neo-colonialist practice whereby wealthy countries dump their irreparable electronics into less affluent countries in the global south, increasingly in Africa). The ‘Useless Machines’ move and look like idiosyncratic machines, but are entirely functionless, as foils to the useful machines lost to landfills.

‘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, I will create new textiles and sculptural work, following the narrative thread of ‘Useless Machines, for a solo exhibition at Quench, Margate.

I am also developing a solo show for October 2023 at God’s House Tower, Southampton. This show, ‘Fetissoes’, will investigate colonial notions of African ‘idol worship’ by developing the aesthetics of ‘Useless Machines’ into totemic 2metre tall artefacts. It will also feature a moving image piece exploring West African pre-colonial religious traditions through the lens of electronic waste. As a person of Cameroonian heritage, I want to do justice to West African spiritualism, which is still vilified and deliberately misunderstood. However upon reflection, I realise that the artist fee will not cover my ambitions for the work.

Furthermore, I am working on a short film called ‘Toghu’ which will explore queer Cameroonian identity through embroidered animation. It will feature a collection of conversations between myself and other queer Cameroonians, both native and diasporic. I will be subverting Cameroon’s traditional textile, Toghu cloth – black velvet richly embroidered with colourful chain stitch – by animating key words from my conversations in the Toghu style, but only using pink thread. This will form an immediate visual cue for queerness. As queerness is seen as a shameful foreign import in Cameroonian society (and law), I aim to literally embroider it into the national fabric of Cameroon and start dissolving this notion. This piece will add to research I have previously explored in commissions from Coventry Pride’s ‘Black, Queer & Done’ and The World Reimagined’s national globe trail. ‘Toghu’ has received development funding from Puppet Animation Scotland.”