LEAN SIX SIGMA
Kialy Tihngang
20 May – 02 July 2023
Following a body of research into supervillains of antiquity (colonial merchants, slave traders, and industrialists), the present (billionaire profiteers of extractive neo-colonial practices such as mining and waste dumping), and the future (colonisers of as-yet-unknown territories such as space and the deep sea), Lean Six Sigma speculates on the opulent ornamentation of these villains’ lairs.
The work looks at opulence as a display of oligarchic overindulgence from a privileged few, distorting and multiplying the shapes of extractive industrial machinery, and the interior aesthetics of dictators’ homes and private jets. However, it also celebrates opulence as a means of Black resistance and Black joy. Lean Six Sigma flickers with formative memories of the artist’s Cameroonian immigrant aunties and uncles’ glamorously decorated homes, and the ostentatious personal styles of Black female rappers, chiefly Lil’ Kim.
Kialy Tihngang
b. Cardiff, 1994
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.
Tihngang is interested in colonial European misrepresentation, extraction, and demonisation of West African cultural practices, drawing from her own experiences as a British-born Cameroonian. She is particularly interested in her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices. In Tihngang’s work, humour is used both as an act of resistance against crushing structural oppressions, but also as a tactic for dissociation and distraction from the disillusionment the artist ls within her multiple identities.
