Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit

23 November 2024 to 30 March 2025
Preview Friday 22 November, 7pm to 9pm

An immersive exhibition by the Scottish-Ghanaian poet, artist, photographer, writer, curator, gallerist and publisher Maud Sulter (1960 – 2008). Curated in collaboration with the Maud Sulter Estate, You are my kindred spirit showcases the artist's rarely exhibited moving image and spoken word archives. 

Sulter’s art testifies to her restless experimentation with a wide range of media. When working on a project she would consider its realisation in a number of presentational forms, including photography, film, text and spoken word performances of her poetry. This exhibition explores the interdisciplinary aspects of Sulter’s wider practice, including her entire film archive and soundscapes created for her installations.

Born in the Gorbals, close to Tramway, Maud Sulter began her career as a writer and award-winning poet, expanding her practice to include photography and visual art. Sulter’s expansive, multi-faceted practice sought to claim space for Black Artists and address the erasure and representation of Black Women in the histories of art, the media, and photography.  

Maud Sulter described herself as Glaswegian Ghanaian and used the Scots vernacular to explore themes of family, diaspora, history, story, and memoir. No Oxbridge Spires (1998) features Maud videoing her family walking in Glasgow’s Gorbals, whilst My Father’s House (1996) documents Sulter’s father’s funeral rites in Ghana. Sulter constantly returned to her family album to retrieve both happy and disquieting memories of growing up in Scotland, included in her photo-series Memories of Childhood (1993), and her suite of poems of the same title. The exhibition also features archival photographs of Sulter’s mother Elsie, Glasgow’s last tram conductor.

Voice is central to the exhibition and Sulter's spoken word soundworks such as The Alba Sonnets (1995) and Blood Money (1994) feature the artist’s distinctive voice. We hear her relish for words, sounds, juxtapositions, Scots dialect and archaic vocabulary. Sulter also summons the voices of others, and gives voice to women whose lives have been unrecorded or marginalised.

Sulter devoted her career to forging new platforms for artists and her remarkable body of work continues to inspire as an active legacy and inheritance for artists working today. This Tramway exhibition celebrates Maud Sulter’s work as a ‘living archive’, and will feature a dynamic events programme curated by researcher and writer, Pelumi Odubanjo.

Header image: Maud Sulter, Self-portrait, 2001-2, large format Polaroid © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow