Victoria-Idongesit Udondian creates work that questions notions of cultural identity and post-colonial positions in relation to her experiences growing up in Nigeria. She works with large-scale sculptural forms and installations utilizing second-hand textiles as the primary material. She is interested in the materiality, as well as the historicity, of the secondhand materials with which she works: how it travels the world from the West to the Global South, carrying the personal as well as social histories of the people involved in this economy, and how those histories begin to be complicated when others acquire the clothing and wear it. She explores this further by creating costumes or hybrid garments that weaves traditional Nigerian and Western myths and narratives together. These costumes get activated with bodies through still photos, performances, or sometimes functioning as sculptural forms.

A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Udondian’s works have been exhibited internationally at South London Gallery, London; Nigerian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial-An Excerpt, Fisher Landau Center for the Arts, New York; Historic Columbia Museum site, Columbia, SC; National Museum, Lagos; Rush Arts Gallery, New York; Judith Charles Gallery, New York; Art 14 London Art Fair; Whitworth Gallery, Manchester; and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Lagos. Artist Residencies include Instituto Sacatar, Bahia, Brazil; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; Villa Straulli, Winterthur, Switzerland; Islington Mill, Salford, Manchester; Fondazione di Venezie, Venice, Italy; Bag Factory Artist Studios, Johannesburg, South Africa. Udondian earned an MFA in sculpture and new genres from Columbia University, a BA in painting from the University of Uyo, Nigeria, and she attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.