Maud Sulter: “You Are My Soulmate” and the Historical Re-empowerment of Black Women
1. A dialogue across time and space
“You Are My Soulmate” – this gentle and firm declaration is the artistic code left to the world by Scottish-Gaster artist Maud Sulter. In the exhibition of the same name at the Tramway Art Center, Sulter’s poetry, photography and sound installations are interwoven into a dense network, capturing the figures of black women erased by history. This exhibition is not only a review of the career of a multifaceted artist, but also a profound questioning of absence and existence: when the mainstream narrative chooses to forget, how can art redraw the coordinates of existence for the marginalized?
2. Sound as a weapon of resistance
If Sulter’s photography is a silent testimony, her sound installation is a deafening declaration. The immersive installation “Asia Sooners” in the center of the exhibition hall is the most representative: in the darkness, Sartre’s low recitation is intertwined with Gast’s traditional elegy, and the projection screen flashes the archive fragments of Diana, two black female attendants in the Scottish court in the 16th century – they really existed, but they were reduced to “exotic decorations” in official records.
3. Reflection on the exhibition: Can art repair the cracks in history?
Sulter said in an interview in 1995: “My work is not to fill the gap, but to prove the existence of the gap.” This sentence reveals the deep intention of the exhibition – it does not try to provide cheap reconciliation, but to tear open the wounds of history, allowing the audience to see the names that have been systematically erased, the narratives that have been tampered with, and the pain that has been obliterated.
Downstairs gallery: a mobile art revelation
1. When the museum becomes a time capsule
Downstairs gallery does not have the linear narrative of a traditional museum, but instead a carefully choreographed “dislocation game” – 17th-century Dutch still life paintings share a wall with 1960s pop art, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass windows and oil paintings of Glasgow slums breathe back to back. The curator uses empty frames, unlabeled exhibits and open routes to throw a provocative proposition to the audience: Who defines the meaning of art?
2. The Ghost of Glasgow: The Hidden Urban Narrative
The “Art Across Borders” exhibition hall staged a more complex identity game. The North African bazaar depicted by the Scottish Color School painters forms a mirror image with the Glasgow docks depicted by Moroccan artists. When the “exotic” is stared at from both sides, the Orientalist filter shatters – it turns out that the colonizer’s brush and the colonized’s eyes share the same pain of nostalgia.
GOMA: Dancing between words and flowers
1. Community is the work: When art becomes a support network
The most moving is a community collaboration work called “FEGS URNY MUGS”. Artist Mandy McIntosh and women from the Ferguslie community printed Glasgow’s classic slogan “Glasgow’s Miles Better” on mugs, but the smiley face logo was replaced with a collective woven thorn pattern. These mugs were used as tea party props in the exhibition, and the audience held them to discuss the class contradictions behind urban renewal – art jumped from the display cabinet into reality and became a lever to pry the dialogue.
2. Metaphor of flowers: Wild growth in discipline
Flowers are the core image throughout the exhibition, but Ross’s flowers refuse to be disciplined. In the series “Dirty Dancing Flowers”, roses and daisies appear in inverted, broken, and even pixelated forms, and acrylic paint drips from the edge of the frame like melted ice cream. The curators cleverly juxtapose these paintings with fabrics by Finnish Marimekko designer Malja Isola – a staple of middle-class Scandinavian living rooms, while Ross’s flowers appear as wild life emerging from cracks in the concrete.
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