Fatimah Tuggar is an interdisciplinary artist working with media technologies to inquire into hegemonic structures and asymmetrical global relations. Born in Kaduna, Nigeria, she was raised in the United Kingdom and studied at the Blackheath School of Art in London. Since the late 1980s, F. Tuggar has studied, lived, and worked in the United States, where she received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1992 and graduated with an MFA from Yale University in 1995. From 1995–1996 she participated in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum. Her lived experiences across three continents have informed her vantage point on how (media) technologies proliferate and resonate across various geopolitical frameworks. Informing her drive to speak about these contradictions are her experiences of growing up in northern Nigeria. Tuggar probes the impact and effect that various technologies have on social and cultural life, particularly race and gender.

Through various methods of making art, often working with already existing objects, images, sounds, and recorded footage, she juxtaposes, combines, and repurposes these with critical and creative intent. Her collages and assemblages often combine West African and Western motifs or imagery to critically assess the impact of technology affecting both the global North and the global South. In her early digital collages such as Working Woman (1997), we witness the artist’s concern with the tensions between cultural and indigenous heritage and the modern technological paradigm by juxtaposing representations of situations of modern life in an African context. What underpins such image-making is her preoccupation with the contradictions of globalization, including the cultural convergences and divergences that it affords.

Another important work is Fai-fain Gramophone (2010), an installation that folds language, local music traditions, and sound technologies into conversation with one another. When vinyl records were initially introduced in northern Nigeria, they were given the name fai-fai—a Hausa word referring to a flat, disc-shaped object made of raffia grass used in many West African kitchens, often to sort grain, fan fires, and cover food—because of their formal similarities. Tuggar sought to play on the double meaning of fai-fai, drawing two traditions into proximity with each other. Through this juxtaposition, she brings indigenous, vernacular terms into relation with other modern technologies such as the turntable.

In this work, Tuggar turns our ears toward the musical contribution of Barmani Choge, a Hausa oral poet from northern Nigeria who, despite being a popular musician, never had her music released on vinyl. Through this innovative redress, Tuggar pays homage to the singer and her musical oeuvre by creating fictional vinyl record albums that Choge might have released. Importantly, this installation reveals multiple vantage points of adaptation and modification, including the disjunction between tradition and modernization.

In addition to working as an artist, Tuggar is also an educator and has taught at numerous universities in the United States and Canada. Her works are held in public collections, some of which include Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City), The Kitchen (New York), The Pérez Art Museum (Miami), and the Studio Museum in Harlem (New York).