Sophie Seita

BIO
Sophie Seita is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores text in its various translations into book objects, performances, videos, or other languages and embodiments. She’s performed and presented her work at Café Oto, [ SPACE ], Hoxton253, the Royal Academy, the Drawing School, Matt’s Gallery, the Cockpit Theatre, 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), New Hall 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, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Cambridge University, PEN America, Hackney Council, Lambeth Council, among others. Her recent publications include: a book of experimental performance writing, 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), a book of lyric essays Lessons of Decal (87Press, 2023), and translations of Uljana Wolf work, Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna, 2017) and Etymological Gossip: Essays and Lectures (Nightboat Books, 2023, forthcoming), as well as art writing in Flesh Arranges Itself Differently (Roberts Institute of Art/Hunterian, 2022) and ON FIGURE/S (Ma Bibliothèque, 2021).

In 2020-2021, Seita was one of nine artists on the Constellations artist development programme run by UP Projects and Flat Time House, which focused on socially engaged practices and public art. In 2022, she was the Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence at Freie Universität Berlin; and in April 2023, she was artist in resident at Brown University and an invited guest lecturer 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 gardening society believed to have been founded by the German mystic and musician Hildegard of Bingen. The collaboration takes the form of a community-oriented and speculative art and research project focused on decolonising and queering gardening histories. This year, the society will present work in the form of a solo exhibition at Mimosa House and public programming at Nottingham Contemporary, Grand Union, the Goldsmiths Allotment, Art Research Garden, and elsewhere. A collaboration with Chiara Dellerba’s Chimera Plantarium is also on the horizon.

Seita has taught and continues to teach in various institutional and non-institutional settings and spaces in the US, UK, and Europe, and is committed to cross-disciplinary and intersectional research, collaboration, co-production, participation, and community-oriented practice. She’s a Lecturer in Fine Art (Studio Practice and Critical Studies) at Goldsmiths and also co-runs the interdisciplinary Sound/Text Seminar through Harvard’s Mahindra Center.

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

Artist Statement
The core of my practice is language, language as material. Everything spins around it and radiates outward from there. My work layers references to other artworks, literary and theoretical texts, classical music and opera, alongside my own experiences and fictional creations. Most of the narratives, characters, and scenes in my writing are rooted in queer and feminist commitments, studied and performed in a non-linear, non-programmatic, and insistently playful fashion. Artifice and abstraction are key to this engagement, as are a real curiosity about embodiment, materiality, and tactility. What’s a sensual or embodied encounter that is still conceptually rigorous and inspired by a conversation with other works and voices across time and space? I engage these questions of dialogue and contact through performance, lecture performance, video, sound pieces, and social practice. The work usually sits or swims between genres and media, united through an exploration within and interwoven through language.

But language isn’t just a tool with a clear output; it comes with context and history. The way we use language is deeply political: the worlds it opens up or closes down, the violence or subversion that resides within it. Since language is often dominated by structures of knowledge that were formed by exclusionary and normative discourses then these structures need to give way to other forms of sense making. This is where difficulty comes in. My work creates intention and tension to allow for that grappling. To delve into the in-between spaces. I’m curious about what can’t be translated, what can’t be communicated. How do we acknowledge ambiguity and multiplicity?

I explore how text and the act of reading can be visualised and translated into movement, sound, space, costume, and performative objects. How can, for example, the body become a publishing platform, and how can we be choreographed by language? 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 and the politics of care.

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 work-in-progress project Literary Live Art (across research, public engagement, and creative practice) similarly looks at the cross-over between experimentation, queer-feminist and intersectional commitments, and community in the context of live art and performance art. 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.

Collaboration is deeply ingrained to how I work. It enables us to learn from our differences—contextual, intergenerational, intersectional, geopolitical—and the responses which shift and realign in dialogue with other artists. In bringing new perspectives, collaboration has allowed me to explore questions of immediate translation through temporal body and tangible voice; and the moments and spaces between.

I’m interested in the uncertain, provisional, fragmented, and often confusing space of language as a site where we can resist the need to be clear, sure, and programmatic. I work with an expanded understanding of translation as a movement not just across languages but also materials and media. This translational lens draws on my experience of being a multilingual writer negotiating questions of authorship and forms of address and agency. Translation invites us to challenge value systems and hierarchies.

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

Portfolio: available upon request

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