ARTISTS’ FILM INTERNATIONAL 2024

COLLECTIF FAIRE-PART

THE STOPOVER (L‘ESCALE, 2022)

Duration: 14:00 mins

Selected by Argos, Centre for Audio Visual Arts, Brussels, Belgium (argosarts.org | @argos_arts)

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh

we would be freer (2023)

Duration: 8:00 mins

Selected by MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan (mmagfoundation.org | @mmagfoundation)

Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass (2023)

Duration: 22:33 mins

Selected by Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway (tromsokunstforening.no | @tromsokunstforening)

Lihuel Gonzalez

Dos personas (Two people, 2018)

Duration: 25:52 mins

Selected by Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina (proa.org | @fundacion_proa)

Bahar Arfan

From Guantanamo Prison Until August 15 (2023)

Duration: 3:51 mins

Selected by Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile, Germany, Frankfurt (facebook.com/ccaainexil | @ccaa-in-exile)

Cassils

Etched in Light (2024)

Duration: 9:38 mins

Selected by LACE, Los Angeles, USA (welcometolace.org | @welcometolace)

Nadeem Din-Gabisi

MASS (2020)

Duration: 13:27 mins

Selected by Forma, London, UK (forma.org.uk | @formaartsmedia)

Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas

filled up, torn open (2022/2024)

Duration: 8:51 mins

Selected by Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania (sapiegurumai.lt | @sapiegurumai)

Caterina Erica Shanta

In Absence (En Ausencia) (2023)

Duration: 26:37 mins

Selected by GAMeC/Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (gamec.it | @gamec_bergamo)

Mary Sullivan

The Fine Line (2023)

Duration: 4:10 mins

Selected by Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (crawfordartgallery.ie | @crawfordartgallery)

Aarti Sunder

Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes (2023)

Duration: 22:07 mins

Selected by Project 88, Mumbai, India (project88.in | @project88mumbai)

Pınar Öğrenci

Inventory (2021)

Duration: 15:56 mins

Selected by Video-Forum of Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k), Berlin, Germany (nbk.org | @neuerberlinerkunstverein)

Milica Rakic

Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you (2021)

Duration: 20:09 mins

Selected by Cultural Center of Belgrade, Serbia (kcb.org.rs | @kulturni_centar_beograda)

Maud Sulter

No Oxbridge Spires (1994)

Duration: 10:48 mins

Selected by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (tramway.org | @glasgowtramway)

Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas

filled up, torn open (2022/2024)

Duration: 8:51 mins

Selected by Sapieha Palace, branch of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius, Lithuania (sapiegurumai.lt | @sapiegurumai)

Filmmakers Paul Shemisi and Nizar Saleh travel from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Germany for the screening of their new film. During a layover in Angola, they’re stopped at the airport because the airline doesn’t trust their documents to be real. While Paul and Nizar think they are being led to a hotel, where they would stay until their flight back home, they are actually being taken to an illegal detention center.

The filmmakers’ testimony – which offers an eye-opening insight into the impossibility of safe and carefree travel for Congolese artists – stands in stark contrast with the seemingly peaceful images of cloud formations passing by an airplane window.

COLLECTIF FAIRE-PART is an ensemble of Belgian & Congolese artists. Together they aim at telling new stories about Kinshasa, about Brussels, and the many complex relations in between. Next to their shared practice, they try to support each other in their personal artistic projects. The group was founded by filmmakers Anne Reijniers, Paul Shemisi, Nizar Saleh and Rob Jacobs when they first started working together in 2016. Over recent years the collective of four has shape-shifted into a larger group of regular collaborators between Belgium and DR Congo, in which team composition changes with each project. Next to filmmaking, they take pictures, curate programs, give workshops and organize a biennial performance festival called SOKL.

A nation caught in the crossfire of global political machinations has tragically succumbed to disaster. As a result, women have been stripped of their rights to education, employment, autonomy, and free speech. This video, a protest work by a young Afghan artist, represents a profound cry of resistance. She and her family are among the countless victims of this calamity. I present this piece as a powerful protest on behalf of 20 million Afghan women suffering under an anti-feminist and anti-art regime.

In an era where widespread violence poses a growing threat, every voice raised in opposition to this global catastrophe must be heard. Bahar Arfan’s protest video is not only a plea for solidarity but also a stark reminder of a looming global menace. As the world increasingly turns against immigration, it is crucial to recognize that many immigrants are fleeing their homelands out of necessity. Instead of fighting against immigrants, we must address the forces that drive forced migration. Amidst this serious threat to global security, the role of art and artists is called into question once more.

BAHAR ARFAN was born in 2000 in Tehran. She completed her studies in her homeland and entered Kabul University in 2018. After the fall of the republic, Bahar immigrated to Germany and is currently a student at the University of Art and Design Offenbach. She is an official member of Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan in Exile e.V.

In light of the ongoing war and severe gender inequality in Afghanistan, her artistic endeavors have centered on highlighting violence against women. She is currently working on a new project aimed at exposing the deeply entrenched patriarchal culture within Afghan society. Her work raises critical questions, such as why women in Afghanistan are imprisoned despite ostensibly having freedom, and why they are subjected to various forms of violence.

Her focus encompasses intellectual violence, political violence, and the oppressive family mindset, all of which strip women of their right to choose and limit their participation in society and politics. These circumstances profoundly influence her artistic activities, driving her to challenge and bring awareness to the pervasive injustices women face.

This film is a subtle yet powerful meditation on women’s vital but so often unseen, unacknowledged and unpaid work. In solidarity with the work and livelihoods of generations of women of island nations, Mary Sullivan’s cinematic postcard aesthetic setting creates an unsettling antedote to the precarious reality of so many women’s living and working conditions.

“At a time when women’s rights are being attacked from various political quarters and island life is being threatened from climate change, Mary Sullivan’s film underscores the importance of recognising the continual solidarity that generations of women have quietly helped and supported not only their communities but each other both physically and psychologically, and continue to do so”. – Dawn Williams, Curator, Crawford, Art Gallery

Mary Sullivan is a visual / performance artist living on Bere Island, Cork. Born 1968, Sullivan works with a variety of mediums including film, installation, performance and sculpture. Her most recent work, The Hold, exhibited on Bere Island June 2022, documents the lives of twenty-four Bere Island residents throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. A graduate of TU Dublin BA (Hons) Visual Art (Sherkin Island), Mary Sullivan received the RDS Taylor Art Award for her work At Home, At War in 2018. She has exhibited in National Botanic Gardens of Ireland; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Leyden Gallery, London and Uillin, West Cork Arts Centre and Bere Island.

Red if you did not exist we would have to invent you deals with historical facts and stories that, regardless of their local context, touch on issues such as women’s rights, gender issues, participation and visibility of women in public life. Through the leftist-utopian narrative of women’s emancipation, the artist develops her own model of criticism, pointing to revolutionary action and the creation of a new utopia, without which there is no art.

The film introduces the character of a heroine, fighter and activist, who personifies the character of the new woman, developed in the struggle. By combining feature and documentary film scenes, along with the off-screen narration, a narrative treats the national liberation struggle and the socialist revolution as something unfinished. The film by Milica Rakić is focused on the issue of female emancipation in post-war Yugoslavia, and on the critique of patriarchal coded interpretations – both in the historical and contemporary context. The observations of the artist’s alter ego friend Rakič, which she performs in tandem with the art historian and performer Vladimir Bjeličić, are contrasted with archival materials related to the activities of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front.

Milica Rakić was born in 1972 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She has presented her work in 30 solo and more than 400 group exhibitions in the country and abroad (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, USA). She is a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and Association of Fine Artists of Serbia, and holds independent artist status. In her work, she examines the way in which language and culture form personal identity.

Nadeem Din-Gabisi’s film MASS departs from Tina Campt’s concept ‘Black visual frequency’ to imagine how a sense of belonging might be found within the alienating urban environment. The film follows a woman seeking connection as she wanders through a grey cityscape and retreats to an inner sanctuary. Contrasting these internal and external worlds, Din-Gabisi explores how collectivity, allegiances and bonds materialise from an individual’s experiences, both seen and unseen. 

Whilst on the street, the film’s protagonist tunes into the invisible waves emitted from radios and satellite dishes; when she takes refuge, solitary reflection cultivates a deeper connection with herself and fosters an empathetic relationship with others. Antennas, speakers and transmitters – the physical devices that emit frequencies and share voices – form a visual backbone for the film and symbolise the unseen ‘signals’ that characterises various aspects of contemporary Black experience around which people identify and congregate. 

Featuring contributions from musician Coby Sey, artist-filmmaker Rhea Storr, and Director of Photography Shivani Hassard, and shot on 16mm, 8mm, and digital video, the film poetically reminds us that belonging resides within, not without and that connection stems from individuals, who together form a mass – a testament to the power of solidarity, collectivity and equilibrium. 

Nadeem Din-Gabisi is an award winning, poet-songwriter and visual artist. Nadeem’s work seeks to reimagine and investigate blackness as it pertains to his experiences as a British born, second generation immigrant of Sierra Leonean descent. Nadeem also looks to examine blackness as it pertains to the unknown, where he explores the depths of human experience to better understand his life and living. Nadeem’s debut album POOL (2022) was selected by Clash Magazine as one of the most slept on albums in 2022 and Jamz Supernova selected him as one of her Class of Supernova 2023. Nadeem is the Winner of the Fred Perry x Nicholas Daley Music Award 2021 and former resident of Somerset House Studios 2018/19. His 2020 short film MASS made in collaboration with FVU has screened at Glasgow Short Film Festival, Alchemy Film Festival and Bali International Short Film Festival. Nadeem’s short blk boy flight (me and my cousins) (2015) was screened at Somerset House and London Short Film Festival in 2019.

Dos personas is an audiovisual project that brings two people together to have a conversation. Zhang Jing and Renaud have never met each other, they only know that their conversation partner does not share the same language. What connects them is the need to emigrate to a different country. The conversations that arise are spontaneous, resulting in a catalog of gestures, voice tones and linguistic similarities that help decode what the other person is saying and thus try to create a new code to make themselves understood.

Dos personas is a project that proposes a viewpoint to the feeling of uprooting, the difficulties that come up when we try to understand the other and what happens in the process of adapting to a new culture. Subtle gestures and attempts at connection reflect a process of empathy and active listening, where each action seeks to overcome cultural and linguistic barriers. This project invites the viewer to reflect on the importance of solidarity and mutual understanding in a diverse and changing world.

Lihuel González (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1986) is a photographer and audiovisual producer trained at the Universidad del Cine. In addition, she participated in art clinics with Gabriel Valansi, Hernán Marina and Alberto Goldenstein, and was part of the FNA – CONTI Training Program (2013), the ABC Program of the Pan y Arte Foundation (2013), and the Artists Program of the Torcuato Di Tella University in its 2014-2015 edition. She has held national and international exhibitions at Galería Gachi Prieto (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019 and 2024); Dallas Museum of Art (Texas, United States, 2018); UNLP Art Center (La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018) and Espacio Pira ADM (Mexico, 2016), among others. She has received numerous awards and recognitions, among which the following stand out: first prize in the UADE National Visual Arts Competition (2021), Mention of the Itaú Award for Visual Arts (2020), third prize in the 108 National Hall of Visual Arts in Argentina (2019), third prize in the National Visual Arts UADE Competition (2018), honorable mention from the Klemm Foundation Prize Jury (2016) and second Prize National Visual Arts Hall – MACA Museo Junín (2016). Likewise, in 2014 and 2018, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her the Creation Scholarship to fund future projects.

Some voices tell of water dreams, wonderful and terrifying omens. In Central America, water is often contaminated and potable water is a private, monopolized commodity. But it has not always been so. Water is thus a political subject one would like to see shared and accessible, implying an overhaul of the entire urban fabric of Mexico City. The marshes of Xochimilco are the last reminder of the immense Lake Texcoco, which disappeared after the 1960s.

En Ausencia is built on the narrative voices of a number of people who joined an open call published by Caterina Erica Shanta while she was in Mexico City, in which she asked them to recount dreams in which water was the main and recurring element.

Born in 1986 in Germany, Caterina Erica Shanta is a visual artist and film director. She works primarily on moving images and contemporary art with different media output, and she makes movies based on private archives and collective film-making practices. Her works have been exhibited in art institutions such as Ca’Pesaro, Cineteca National de CDMX, MART, GaMEC, Careof – non profit for contemporary art, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, MAMBO, and screened in many film festivals such as Oberhausen Film Festival, 30-70 International Short Film Festival, Lo Schermo dell’Arte, Filmmakers Film Festival, Trento Film Festival. She was awarded with many prizes, among which the recent MUFOCO “L’Italia è un desiderio”, and the Italian Council talent support.

Audiences of Etched in Light encounter the ongoing political realities of transgender rights in America. Through the vision and direction of Cassils, a Transgender artist, viewers are guided through a visual and sonic performance that aims to combat these oppressive systems through the creation of a large-scale cyanotype. The performance took place on Trans Day of Visibility (March 31, 2024) at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Cassils chose this location to engage with the history of the site as a platform for countless past activists. Over 100 performers gathered together and were instructed to lie down on four large canvases in choreographed positions. These canvases were then subsequently transformed into cyanotypes with the imprints of the performers’ bodies left behind. The use of cyanotypes provided Cassils space to elaborate on the history and impact of photography whilst commenting on the power to deny the voyeuristic gaze often imposed on Trans bodies. By including performers from across the country and around the world, this project cultivated community and networks that will endure through times of systemic failure. By lying down together, the performers embraced their strength and care for one another, creating a powerful symbol of solidarity.

CASSILS (Los Angeles/ NYC) is a Canadian transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils’ art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, and empowerment. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils’ work investigates historical contexts to examine the present moment.

Cassils currently has solo exhibitions at Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity (AB) and an upcoming solo show at SITE Santa Fe (NM). Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester (UK); Station Museum of Contemporary Art (TX); Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts(AU); Ronald Feldman Fine Arts (NYC); Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PA); School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (MA); Bemis Center (OH); MU Eindhoven, (NL). 

we would be freer is a short film reflecting on the relationship between native plants and peoples living under settler-colonialism. Through storytelling, the film looks at the sumac plant as a medicine, a spice, a dye, and more. Known for its zesty taste and bright colour, different varieties of sumac are found around the world. In particular, staghorn sumac is native to parts of Turtle Island, and tanner’s sumac to the eastern Mediterranean. Weaving between the voices of two women, one from the Mohawk community of Kahnawá:ke and the other an internally displaced refugee in Ramallah, we would be freer invites you to contemplate the role of the sumac plant in two occupied lands that lie far apart. Mimicking the progression of the plant’s flowers from yellow to green to red, the short film is a cyclical reflection on connection to land, sustainability, and wild plants.

Rana Nazzal Hamadeh is a Palestinian artist based on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin land. Her photography, film, and installation works look at issues related to time, space, memory, and movement, offering interventions rooted in a decolonial framework. Rana holds an MFA in Documentary Media from Toronto Metropolitan University and finds herself between Ramallah and Ottawa.

Ghost Cut – Some Clear Pixels Amongst Many Black Boxes draws from conversations with Amazon MTurk workers and their relationship with the politics of the Mechanical Turk platform – the varying levels of transparencies and opacities that make the platform what it is.

Focusing on the backend of AI and machine learning processes, in this work, Aarti Sunder investigates the relationships between the analogic, digital, and the terrestrial. What kind of (human) labour is required for the smooth functioning of an automation? Who does this backend labour, where does it take place, and what does it entail?

A secondary focus is the exploration of the subjective nature of data gathering, processing, and annotating, along with the material infrastructures it is dependent on. In the absence of fixed constants and safety nets, abstraction emerges as an important and forced tool.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India (Chennai). She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society. Aarti published Pla$orm Politics – Within, Above and Under, a short set of contributions that considered different readings into the idea of the pla$orm. Ideas ranged from contemporary philosophy to online niche spaces, to education, AI/labour, and the future of gig work. Currently she is working on technology and its relationship with the spiritual, where those overlaps become a mode of governance and what kinds of visuals are born out of that relationship.

Aarti has exhibited her work at Hayy Jameel, the Singapore Biennale 22, 1ShanthiRoad, Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, MIT, Warehouse421, Goethe Insitute, Kunstverein Leipzig, BauhausImaginista, ISCP and the Museum of Yugoslav History. She has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from MIT, Sommerakademie Paul Klee, Ashkal Alwan, Harvard FSC Film Center, Akademie Der Kunstand Sharjah Art Foundation amongst others. Recent screenings of her work include the 67th BFI London Film Festival and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2023. Currently her work is being shown at the Albertinum – Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in Germany.

filled up, torn open (2022/2024) stands at the intersection of the familiar and the taboo. The familiar is highlighted through repeated references to pop culture, contemporaneity in both its physical and online forms, and religious iconography. The taboo appears in the way these disparate yet corresponding elements converge – through the sensual, intimate, and sometimes violent bodily proximity of the characters that occupy the mise en scène. Nameless and discontinuous, they glide through the narrative with an obscureness that mirrors the fragmentary nature of the film itself. What unites them is the force of desire, the search for limit experiences that would surpass, even if for a brief moment, the constraints of their physical bodies. In the resulting fever dream-like narrative, the status quo of the rational world breaks apart and, in its stead, new radical imaginaries emerge.

Deividas Vytautas Aukščiūnas (b. 1996, Chicago, USA) is a Lithuanian visual artist living and working between Berlin and Vilnius. Aukščiūnas received his MA in contemporary art practice from the Royal College of Art (UK) in 2022 and a BA in film from the University of Westminster (UK) in 2017. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Todestrieb at Generation & Display, London (2024), Escapismus at Kunstpunkt, Berlin (2024), Surface Tension at Des Bains, London (2024), Shells of the Self at Crash Club, Warsaw (2024), Flashbang at Vilnius Higher Education Institution (2023), Collective Healing Youth Club (ACT I) at Meno Parkas Gallery, Kaunas (2023), Audra at Mykolas Žilinskas Art Gallery, Kaunas (2023), Soft When Warm at Guts Gallery, London (2023), Spaces at Composers House, Vilnius (2021), Everything Forever at Sissy Club, Marseille (2021). Aukščiūnas was selected as one of the CIRCA PRIZE class of 2023 finalists with the video piece Collective Healing Youth Club (2023). In 2021 he received the JCDecaux award from the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) for his film tight grip, it makes me feel safe (2021).

Land Bodies, Decomposing Mass is an audiovisual collaboration between Ingrid Bjørnaali, Maria Simmons and Fabian Lanzmaier, focusing on peatlands and their interpretation through various recording and 3D computing technologies. Through the use of photogrammetry, a technology that relates to satellite mapping and archiving of anthropocentric spaces and monuments, the biotope is interpreted bit by bit in an intimate, close-up interaction. The work explores specific peatlands in Finland, Norway and Canada from various perspectives, decentralizing the human experience and focusing on the idea of natural landscapes as sources as opposed to resources.

The text in the voice over is based on research, myths and field notes from encounters with peatlands. It is inspired by texts written by Anna Tsing, Karen Barad and Espen Sommer Eide, from the books ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ and ‘Spectres 1: Composing Listening/Composer L’ecoute’.

Ingrid Bjørnaali is a multidisciplinary artist who records specific biotopes in various states of their ongoing world-building processes. With an aim to learn from our surrounding nature and co-existing species, she makes intimate close-up readings through e.g. photogrammetry that relates to satellite mapping and mediation of anthropocentric spaces and monuments. Her works explore the omnipresence of the digital in our experience of the world as well as the inability of technology to articulate matter’s complexity.

Fabian Lanzmaier is a musician and sound artist living in Vienna. In his often collaborative works, he mixes sound and other media such as performance, sculptural elements, light, and video. In his live performances and compositions he uses audio synthesis to explore aspects of texture and structure of sound as well as its presence within space. In his recent work he is experimenting with perception and ideas of natural / artificial sounds, fluid and ambiguous environments.

Maria Simmons is a Canadian artist who investigates potentialized environments through the creation of hybrid sculptures and installations. Her work embraces contamination as an act of collaboration. She collects garbage, grows yeast, ferments plants, and nurtures fruit flies. She makes art that eats itself.

Inventory is a remake of Yugoslavian director Želimir Žilnik’s original Inventur – Metzstraße 11 from 1975. In the 1970s, repression by the Yugoslav government drove Žilnik into exile in West Germany, where he shone a light on the living conditions of the so-called “guest workers.” Similarly, artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci had to migrate to Germany in 2018 due to repressions of the current regime in Turkey. For both Žilnik and Öğrenci the stairs of a building with multiple apartments are a collective space where tenants meet. Whereas Žilnik filmed the residents of a house in Munich, Öğrenci’s work is set in Chemnitz and depicts the anti-racist struggles of people living there. In the original film, where most of the interviewees had arrived under West German “recruitment agreements” as ‘guests’, they are seen coming down the stairs. Öğrenci’s version shows the protagonists walking up, going to their apartments. It turns out that Öğrenci depicts Chemnitz as a permanent space rather than a temporary home for the migrants. They talk about their life histories, their connections to the region and their commitment against racism as well as the everyday experience of discrimination in its structural and its individual forms.

Artist and filmmaker Pınar Öğrenci (1973, Van, Turkey) lives in Berlin. Through various mediums, such as photography, video, film, performance, and installation, she explores themes such as migration, war, state violence, assimilation, collective movements, and natural disasters.

Her works have been exhibited widely at museums and art institutions including 60thVenice Biennial 2024), documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel, Berlinische Galerie (2023), 12th Gwangju Biennial (2018), 6th Athens Biennial (2018), Sharjah Biennial13 (2017), Survival Kit (2019), Tensta Konsthall Stockholm (2018), Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) Stuttgart (2017), MAXXI Museum, Rome (2016), SALT Galata, Istanbul (2015-16). Her first solo exhibition abroad was realized at Kunst Haus-Hundertwasser Museum in Vienna, A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us in 2017.

Maud Sulter’s work No Oxbridge Spires explores family diaspora, history, story, and memoir, to evoke a sense of what is left of a community as it vanishes into memory. 

The video overlays Maud’s short story No Oxbridge Spires (published 1989) onto a videoed meander through the “Old Gorbals” in Glasgow, accompanied by her mother Elsie, aunt Marjorie and two children – Ama and Efie. A journey that leads us through complex layers of biography, history, story, and diasporic experience, that interknit black female experience alongside reflections on working class solidarity and identity. The film poignantly comes to rest outside Maud’s childhood home, now boarded up, condemned and slated to be demolished. 

“And it made me wonder about how communities are lost.

No Oxbridge Spires for us. 

No Ancient Relics carved in Stone. 

No permanence.” – Maud Sulter

Maud Sulter, born in Glasgow, Scotland, UK (1960–2008), was an award-winning artist and writer, cultural historian, curator and gallerist of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in the UK. 

Throughout her career and across different media, Maud Sulter interrogated the representation of black women in the histories of art, the media and photography, investigating the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years.

“This whole notion of the disappeared, I think, is something that runs through my work. I’m very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly black women’s experience and black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalized. So that is important for me as an individual, and obviously as a black woman artist, to put black women back in the centre of the frame – both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates.”