Dorothea Schlegel Artist-in-Residence Sophie Seita: The Residency (Nov–Dec 2022)

Sophie Seita is a London-based artist whose practice explores text in its various translations into book objects, performances, videos, fabric-sculptures, or other languages and embodiments. Her work has been commissioned, performed, supported, and exhibited by, for example, Queer Art Projects, [ SPACE ], Rupert (Vilnius), The Hunterian (Glasgow) and The Roberts Institute of Art, La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Printed Matter (NYC), Bold

Tendencies, the Arnolfini, JNU (New Delhi), Raven Row, Parasol Unit, Art Night London, Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Council, UP Projects, and Flat Time House. With her long-term collaborator Naomi Woo, she co-runs The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, which revives a queer-feminist gardening society believed to have been founded by Bingen in the 12th century.

During her Dorothea Schlegel Artist Residency (November-December 2022), Sophie Seita engaged in a period of practice-based research and developed a new body of work involving textiles, translation, performance, and sound, loosely grouped under the working title withwithwith, also the title of a large textile piece the artist made for a performance in 2022. The project continued her ongoing preoccupation with queer abstraction and formalism, texture, tactility, and the materiality of language. In her multidisciplinary practice, she often begins with or returns to language, as a means to explore new forms of sense making, play, and polyphony. For Seita, language is always enmeshed with context, history, ambiguity, complicity; it is also a material that resists any easy ‘use’ or certainty. Committed to curiosity, not-knowing, and surprise, her work practises and invites close listening, layering, and openness.

Seita engaged in conversations and collaborations at the Cluster and beyond and shared her work in distinct but related events and projects.