Maud Sulter – Passion
25th April – 21st June
Street Level Photoworks, Trongate 103, Glasgow
Clio, Courtesy Dundee City Council. Copyright Maud Sulter estate.
About:
Maud Sulter (1960–2008) was an award-winning artist and writer, curator and gallerist of Ghanain and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in Britain.
Her significance lies in her pioneering innovation of photographic forms that investigated the visual representation of black women, not through the more familiar routes of documentary, but through critical inquiry into art’s histories and sustained visual interrogation into the canon of western art. Her works were often preoccupied with lost and neglected figures, examining the ways that the past shapes and can remake the present. Her photographs decisively put black women back in the centre of the frame.
Maud Sulter won critical praise for her bold, experimental and exquisitely produced works with their sensual splendour and inventive image construction. Her later self-portraits were applauded for their beauty, sensuality, confidence and ability to dramatise a situation.
‘She exhibited widely and represented Britain at Africus, the Johannesburg Biennale of 1995. Her art has been acquired by numerous private and public collections, including the Scottish Parliament, the Arts Council Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Council Collection, the National Galleries of Scotland, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. She wrote several collections of poetry, and edited a pioneering collection of writings and images, Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. This was published by the imprint she founded, Urban Fox Press, ‘a revolutionary new press for the more radical 90s’. She was active in the Black feminist and lesbian movements, often inspired by African-American activists, artists and writers. She curated nearly 20 exhibitions, and set up a gallery, Rich Women of Zurich in London’s Clerkenwell.
Les Bijoux, Maud Sulter Estate.
Maud Sulter: Passion includes key chapters in her multilayered photographic art practice: works from the critically acclaimed Zabat (1989), and for the first time since their initial exhibitions across Britain, several works from each of the projects Hysteria, Syrcas andLes Bijoux. This exhibition represents the first detailed examination and exhibition of Sulter’s work since 2003, with exclusive and unique access by the curators to the Sulter archive. The exhibition draws upon individual private collections, as well as works in the public holdings of Harris Museum and Art Gallery (Preston), The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum, and City Arts Centre, Edinburgh.
Zabat, 1989, V&A Collection, London.
This exhibition is an Autograph ABP / Street Level Photoworks partnership, in association with TrAIN (Transnational Art and Nation) and is the outcome of a curatorial research project by Deborah Cherry, Professor of Art History at the University of the Arts London, and Deputy Director of TrAIN, and artist and curator Ajamu, funded by Arts Council England.
Please check back for details of associated events.
Street Level Photoworks are also exhibiting Maud Sulter’s ‘About Face’ at Hillhead Library, a series of large format Polaroid portraits of ten Scottish poets taken in 2002, in partnership with the Scottish Poetry Library.
http://www.institutephotographyscotland.org
(press release)