AN immersive exhibition celebrating the work of a Scottish-Ghanian poet will open its doors in Glasgow next month.
The exhibit will put a spotlight on Gorbals-born Maud Sulter, who was also an artist, photographer and writer.
Taking place in the front gallery of Tramway, not far from the artist’s birthplace, her rarely seen moving image and spoken word archives will be showcased. The display will debut to the public on November 23.
Sulter (pictured) began her career as an award-winning writer/poet before expanding her work to include visual art.
Born into a working-class Glasgow family, she was also an activist, curator, historian, and organiser who used much of her work to create representation for black artists of the past and present.
This new gallery will explore Sulter’s familial archives and usage of old Scots language within her work. Photos and videos from her life will be prominent – the 1996 piece My Fathers House documents footage of her father’s funeral rites in Ghana.
Her mother Elsie, one of Glasgow’s last tram conductors, will also feature in some of the works.
The spoken word will be central to this exhibition, with the poet’s distinctive voice utilising classical Scots dialect to tell the story of herself and other historical black women.
She devoted her career to carving paths for black artists and keeping their past alive and continues to do so despite her death in 2008 aged just 47.
For example, the five-part series Syrcas (1993) investigates the forgotten history of black European genocide during the Holocaust through photomontage, juxtaposing classic European art with African art objects.
The 1995-piece Plantation combines video and voice to critique the classic Charlotte Bronte novel Jane Eyre.
Eyre is seen as one of history’s great heroine protagonists, but this artwork explores the marginalisation of the Jamaican Creole character Bertha Mason, Sulter placing herself in the frame with genuine footage of her receiving surgery on her womb.
Sulter won numerous awards in her short life and her work is on display in museums and libraries up and down the country.
The contemporary fine artist once said: “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 it’s 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.”
The project will run until the end of March 2025.
