‘seven x seven’ marks the Scottish exhibition debut of London-based artist susan pui san lok, bringing together new commissions and existing work across installation, sound, film and text, for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2021. The exhibition focuses upon the artists’ enquiry into witchcraft, gender and persecution via themes of voice, memory, remembrance and resistance. Presented as a collaboration between the Courtauld and The Glasgow School of Art, this artist talk will discuss the artists’ presentation for Glasgow International 2021, and her 2019 exhibition ‘A COVEN A GROVE A STAND’ at Firstsite, Colchester. A limited edition multiple with texts from curators Mother Tongue and Dr Alexandra Kokoli will be launched as part of this event.
Organised by Edwin Coomasaru (The Courtauld) and Rachel Warriner (The Courtauld).
susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London. Exhibiting and publishing since the mid-1990s, her practice-research projects range across immersive installation, moving image, sound, performance and text, evolving out of interests in archives, memory, nostalgia, amnesia, diaspora, displacement and translation. She studied BA Fine Art and MA Feminism and the Visual Arts at the University of Leeds, going on to complete a PhD at the University of East London with Aavaa, the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive. Selected solo exhibitions include: A COVEN A GROVE A STAND, Firstsite, Colchester (2019); RoCH Fans & Legends, CFCCA, Manchester (2016) and QUAD, Derby (2015); Faster, Higher, MAI, Montreal (2014) and BFI Southbank Gallery, London (2008); Golden (Lessons), Beaconsfield, London (2006) and Golden, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2005). Selected group exhibitions include: Rewinding Internationalism, Van Abbemuseum (2022, forthcoming), Diaspora Pavilion, Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2018); Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Asia Time, the 1st Asia Biennial and 5th Guangzhou Triennial (2015-2016); Everything Flows, De La Warr Pavilion (2012); and Cities on the Move, Hayward Gallery (1999). Publications include: visual/text essays, book chapters, journal articles and several artist books and multiples, of which seven x seven (2021) is her seventh. She is currently Professor in Contemporary Art and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute at UAL.
Mother Tongue was founded as an independent curatorial project in 2009 by Tiffany Boyle and Jessica Carden. Based out of Glasgow, they have since produced exhibitions, film programmes, discursive events and texts, working both locally and further afield. They have worked in partnership with organisations including CCA Glasgow, National Galleries of Scotland, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh Printmakers, LUX Scotland, and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. They have undertaken guest residencies with organisations spanning CCA Glasgow; Galerie de l’UQAM Montreal; Fresh Milk Barbados; and VideoCLub, and are part of the organisation cohort behind the 2017 and 2019 Tilting Axis Caribbean Fellowships. They were the first independent curators to be awarded an Art Fund New Collecting Award in 2018, for their ongoing ‘AfroScots’ project, mentored by Prof. Lubaina Himid CBE. Independently receiving PhDs from Birkbeck (Tiffany) and the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), UAL (Jessica) respectively, Tiffany is now based at The Glasgow School of Art and held a Hauser & Wirth Institute NY Postdoctoral and Senior Scholar Fellowship 2019-20, researching pivotal shifts in the practice of seminal Caribbean artist Donald Locke through the 1970s.