MAUD SULTER’S ‘You are my Kindred Spirit’ by Federica Giardino

Scottish artist Maud Sulter (1960-2008) worked in multi-media as a photographer, filmmaker, poet, playwright and visual artist. Born of Scottish and Ghanaian parentage, she was raised in the Gorbals in Glasgow by her Scottish mother, and much of her work – including that now on show at the Tramway – is an exploration of of her sexuality, gender and identity as a black woman. Federica Giardino reviews the show and ponders on the cultural richness and the ‘poignant questions’ her work highlights.

Maud Sulter, You are my Kindred Spirit, Tramway

Maud Sulter’s resounding voice welcomes the visitor to the Tramway’s exhibition You are my kindred spirit. The imposing audio rendition of The Alba Sonnets thunders across the room, recounting the emotional vicissitudes of two black women attending the court of James IV of Scotland. The presence of Elen and Margaret, as Sulter identified the two protagonists, is sublimated into the exhibition space: the intensity afforded to their voices serves to offset the invisibility of their bodily presence, and infers the neglect of the collective experience of black women in Scotland during the late Middle Ages. The centrepiece installation, Alba (1995), further emphasises the evanescent memory of their stories, with African sculptures and artworks of Eurocentric taste being displayed together as relics of the two women’s existence. For Sulter, it is of primary importance that Elen and Margaret be heard and that their voices, sombre and deprived of tonal embellishments, usher the visitor through the exhibition space and follow them home.

Similarly, the mantric repetition of Gertrude Stein’s “Can women have wishes?” included in Sulter’s video work Plantation (1994), and the unremitting appeal to the visitor to memorialise the overlooked prosecution and deaths of black people during the holocaust (“Would you?”), as part of the work Syrcas (1993) / Blood Money (1994), are effective in instilling a haunting sense of introspection. Sulter dares ask more of the visitor than to merely observe. Each artwork requires the viewer to engage with the exhibited material by becoming bodily entangled in the representation – to be part of it by accepting the invitation to sit, to enter a dark enclosed space to view footage that is highly personal to the artist, to listen to the spoken words in the public space of the room or in private, through headphones; to ponder on the questions being asked through an embodied position.

The Alba installation aptly condenses the tessellation of creative methodologies employed by Sulter in her practice, including spoken word and audio-visual material alongside photography, which she blended to subvert the exclusion of black women’s histories from Western narratives. As a Scottish-Ghanaian artist, she was also profoundly engaged in the cross-cultural exploration of her heritage, utilising linguistic variations to express distinct socio-historical conditions, and to situate herself or her protagonists inside or outside the phenomena of these cultures. Hence The Alba Sonnets incorporate linguistic elements from Old Scots; the archival video footage My Father’s House (1997), chronicling the funeral ceremonies of Sulter’s father, records Ghanaian people speaking and chanting in Twi – a language with which Sulter had little familiarity; No Oxbridge Spires (1997) documents the artist walking with her mother, aunt, and two daughters along the streets of the Gorbals in Glasgow—the neighbourhood in which Sulter lived until her teenage years. Here, the adults can be heard exchanging extemporaneous remarks with respect to the urban landscape and the changing identity of the area. While elements of the Glaswegian vernacular are infrequently employed throughout the dialogue, the local accent is eminently distinguishable.

The opening footage in No Oxbridge Spires serves to introduce Sulter’s reading of her homonymous written work, which centres on the figure of her grandfather and recounts a series of childhood memories, with a particular interest in the living conditions afforded by the typology of the tenement. She describes the domestic reality positively in terms of spatial provision (“It had an enormous bay window and a trio of sash frames”, despite the flat being one room and kitchen), community aspects, and safety (“Everyone knew what everyone was up to, so it was less likely than anyone would get away with a scam.”) The prose piece looks at mundane events with sentimentality and childlike wonder, emphasising the sense of pride which local business owners used to possess some decades prior, manifest in the careful upkeep of their shops (“The brasses shone as if of solid gold”). Sulter contrasts these attitudes with recent experiences, whereby “computerised” processes and prevalent dispassion for one’s trade have led the artist to “wonder about how communities are lost.” This is reflected in the urban fabric of the city at large, as testified by the conversation between Maud Sulter and her mother Elsie, who laments the loss of local establishments and the neglect of some of the tenements in the Gorbals at the time of filming (late 1990s), ultimately remarking “How could they have made such a mess of them?”

The cultural and geographic realities of Scotland, Sulter’s hometown Glasgow, and the working-class background engendered by the native neighbourhood play a crucial role in Sulter’s work, and constitute the framework of her explorations of genealogy, familial bonds, cross-generational experiences, and diaspora – childhood events are further captured in the photographs from the installation Memories of Childhood (1993), which position the artist as the focal subject engaged in daily activities within the Scottish reality. However, Sulter allows for her Scottish and Ghanaian roots and associated histories to merge in unexpected ways, for example, by embedding the legend of the flying Africans in the retelling of a childhood episode which saw the author falling off the pram during a windy day: “We were halfway along Caledonia Road when Whoosh! Off I fly like the ancestors on my daddy’s side.” The same myth is at the centre of Sphinx (1989), which combines Sulter’s recital of the composition The Ballad o’ the Wing in a Glaswegian dialect with a static image of the Great Sphinx, bringing focus to the victims of the West African slave trade.

Sulter’s presence in her work is essential and multiform. More specifically, her bodily involvement, or absence thereof, is carefully adapted to each installation and contributes to its signification. In her commentary to My Father’s House, she explains that while she is physically present at her father’s funeral and sporadically makes an appearance in the hour-long footage of the ceremonies, her inability to speak Twi has an exclusionary effect, positioning the artist as peripherally to the scene as the in-looker sitting in the exhibition space. This spatial conceptualisation is significant, as it reproduces an emotional fracture in the father-daughter bond, as he had been absent from her life until the event of his death. In the self-portrait series Les Bijoux I-IX (2002), Sulter impersonates Haitian-born Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s muse, while intent on removing her jewels, and ousts her from her role as mistress while reversing the perception of the body as a site of oppression; Sulter’s body is here the vessel through which Duval can attain a concrete presence, which was consistently denied to her by historiography.

In Plantation, we witness a reconstructive surgical operation being carried out on Sulter’s abdomen; the footage is superimposed with excerpts from Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre, suggesting that the narrative surrounding the oppressed and ‘othered’ body of Bertha Mason ought to be repaired through the renewed remembrance, visibility, and empowerment of her character. The works Alba, Sphinx, and Syrcas / Blood Money all rely on Sulter’s disembodied voice to communicate the shunning, exploitation, or murder of a plurality of historical black collectives: black noblewomen in 16th-century Scotland in Alba, the black European populaces in Syrcas / Blood money; and the enslaved peoples of Africa’s West Coast in Sphinx. In these works, absence is rendered obvious, at times heightened by the motionlessness of the accompanying artworks on display, and allows for the protagonists’ voices to emerge unobstructed. In No Oxbridge Spires, Sulter is recording the excursion with her family, conversing with her mother while hidden behind the camera; she is dialogically present but corporeally absent. Despite this, it is easier to find an answer to Sulter’s mother’s question regarding the decline of the Glasgow tenements than it is to understand the experiences of Monique, the Cameroon-born protagonist of Blood Money who lived and perished under Nazi Germany. Hence the poem’s repeated question “Would you?” is rhetorical, and while Monique’s body cannot be present in the room, Saulter asks us to preserve her memory.

In each of these artworks, the artist’s body – and the black body in particular, through its presence or absence – serves to communicate the stories of those who have been forgotten. Sulter’s poignant questions exhort the observer to remember. While many of those questions cannot be answered, they linger in the visitor’s conscience long after they have left the gallery space.