Sophie Seita

BIO
Sophie Seita is an artist and researcher who works with writing, performance, installation, video, textiles, and sound in her multidisciplinary art practice, using language and the body as sites of conceptual, material, and political enquiry. She’s performed and presented her work at Café Oto, [ SPACE ], Hoxton253, the Royal Academy, the Drawing School, Matt’s Gallery, Art Night 2018 and 2019, Raven Row, Bold Tendencies, the Serpentine, Parasol Unit (all London), Taller Bloc (Santiago, Chile), SAAS-Fee Summer Institute of Art (Berlin), the Arnolfini (Bristol), Company Gallery, Issue Project, Printed Matter, and La MaMa Galleria (all NYC), the Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam), JNU (New Delhi, India), Taller Bloc (Santiago, Chile), The Women’s Art Collection, Kettle’s Yard (both Cambridge), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and elsewhere. She’s received funding, fellowships, and commissions from Fonds DaKu (Performing Arts Fund, Germany), the Wellcome Collection, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, British Council, Canada Council, Canada High Commission, Creative Scotland, Deutscher Übersetzungsfonds, a-n, Dover Prize at Darlington, Princeton University, Yale University, Cambridge University, PEN America, Hackney Council, Lambeth Council, among others. Her recent publications include: a book of art writing, Lessons of Decal (87Press, 2023), a book of experimental performance texts, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020), a book of criticism, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019), a performance script The Gracious Ones (Earthbound Press, 2020), as well as art writing in Flesh Arranges Itself Differently (Roberts Institute of Art/Hunterian, 2022) and ON FIGURE/S (Ma Bibliothèque, 2021). In 2022, she was the Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence at Freie Universität Berlin; and in April 2023, she was artist in residence at Brown University and an invited guest speaker at Cornell’s Humanities Center. Currently, she holds the transdisciplinary Werner Düttmann Fellowship 2023/2024 at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of the Arts) in Berlin.

With her long-term collaborator Naomi Woo, she co-runs The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, which revives a feminist and queer gardening society believed to have been founded by the German mystic and musician Hildegard of Bingen. The collaboration takes the form of a community-driven and speculative art and research project focused on decolonising and queering gardening histories. So far, the society has presented work in the form of a solo exhibition at Mimosa House; a zine called The Minutes; and various performances, rituals, and workshops at Nottingham Contemporary, Grand Union, the Cockpit Theatre, the Centre for Art & Ecology (Goldsmiths), Ruta del Castor (Mexico City), and elsewhere.

Seita is a Lecturer in Fine Art (Studio Practice) and Director of Critical Studies (Fine Art Extension Degree) at Goldsmiths and also co-runs the interdisciplinary Sound/Text Seminar through Harvard’s Mahindra Center. Prior to Goldsmiths, Seita was an Assistant Professor at Boston University, a Research Fellow at Cambridge University, and a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and New York University. Committed to collaboration, participation, and experimental non-hierarchal learning, Seita has also taught in non-institutional and alternative education settings, and was one of nine artists on the Constellations artist development programme run by UP Projects and Flat Time House; which supported artists interested in socially engaged practices and mutual learning.

She lives in Hackney with her wife Laura and their rescue dog Cosmo.

Artist Statement
My practice is grounded in writing and performance but swerves voraciously into other mediums, such as sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. I always explore the machinations, possibilities, and politics of aesthetic form. I’m interested in a type of queer abstraction that is enriched by identity and experience, but isn’t necessarily ‘about’ it in any straightforward fashion; instead it’s more of a commitment to a form of thinking, making, and relating, which I’d call a new grammar of relationality. Queer abstraction signals non-linear, unpredictable, unfixed, and constantly shifting approaches to the body, knowledge, form, and desire.

Seeing that the core of my practice is language as material, I usually ask myself how text and the act of reading can be visualised and translated into textiles, movement, sound, space, costume, and performative or sculptural objects. How can, for example, the body become a publishing platform, and how can we be choreographed by language? How can I make language touchable, and how can I or we be touched by language? Textiles and forms of printing are an extension of this thinking out of or into language-as-material, and so many of my textile pieces often become garment sculptures or ‘talking textiles’ when they’re activated through sound or (imagined) performance.

Since language is often dominated by structures of knowledge that were formed by exclusionary and normative discourses or simply by habit, then these structures need to give way to other forms of sense making. This is where difficulty comes in. My work asks audiences to grapple with that difficulty, to delve into the in-between spaces, to question some habits. I’m curious about what can’t be communicated directly. How do we acknowledge ambiguity and multiplicity? How do we enjoy ‘not-getting-it’, or things that might sensorily or intellectually confuse us? I subscribe to what I’d call a sort of suspended aesthetics, which draws on Freud’s notion of ‘evenly suspended attention’; in other words, I invite audiences to allow their minds and bodies to hover and float around the work, without demanding immediate clarity or answers from it, or from themselves!

I’m interested in the uncertain, provisional, fragmented, and often messy space of art practice as a site where we can resist the need to be clear, sure, and programmatic. Formally and tonally, I’m interested in the tangibly difficult, the whimsical, in polyrhythms, lush abstraction, sonic pleasure, and performative poise. My polyphonic investigations are also about listening. I’m dedicated to an attentive politics that recognises that aesthetic forms are never unburdened but enmeshed with our complex and complicit relations with(in) the world. My recent work therefore thinks about environmental sustainability, ecology, more-than-human relationships, and speculative archives. I’m interested in holding this complexity and complicity, dialectically. Performance, too, is an art of sustained (if distracted) attention, because it is durational; it teaches us something about the politics of attention: who pays attention, when, and how.

Aware that we never make work in a vacuum but within an ecosystem of other voices and practices, my work often layers references to other artworks, literary and theoretical texts, classical music and opera, across space and time. My thinking and making is rooted in queer and feminist commitments and histories, studied and performed in a non-linear, non-programmatic, and insistently playful fashion. These forms of contact or dialogue or entanglement can be recalcitrant, intimate, or resolutely ambivalent. Abstraction is key to this engagement with form and history (because it allows for indeterminacy and openness), as is a real curiosity about embodiment, materiality, and tactility. In other words, what’s a sensual and embodied encounter with material that is conceptually rigorous and historically informed, but also aesthetically cohesive on its own terms?

For a long time now, I’ve researched the history and theory of experimentation across different art forms, how social and political issues find expression in or are subverted through form, as defined by different communities of practice. My first book of criticism—Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019)—described how literary and artistic communities are created through independent magazines and small presses which help us revise the canon, especially from a feminist angle. My current artistic research project Touching Language: Queer Writing In/As Performance is an autoethnographic exploration of somatics, queer abstraction, experimental form, and creative access methods in the context of text-based visual art and performance art.

Collaboration is deeply ingrained to how I work. It enables me to learn from our differences—contextual, intergenerational, intersectional, geopolitical—and the responses which shift and realign in dialogue with other artists. I’m particularly interested in the contact zone between art, research, and pedagogy, both inside and outside of institutions, drawing on artistic research methods and community-oriented co-creation.

Contact: s.seita [at] gold.ac.uk

Portfolio: available upon request

Some interviews/reviews:
Elephant magazine
Jacket2
3AM
LGBTQ+@Cam