Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence

Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

November – Dezember 2022

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During her Dorothea Schlegel Artist Residency, Sophie Seita will work on a new body of work involving textiles, translation and sound. Following her ongoing preoccupation with queer intimacy, texture, tactility and the materiality of language, she will research and experiment with forms of reading, making and performance that touch on questions such as: How close can I be to (other voices on) the page? Can language choreograph or hold me? How can I wrap myself in or bend around language? How do we do right in art and right by the material? How do we give up the safety of abstraction and commit to the sayable without fear of simplification? How can the simple be resonant with complexity? For her, language is always enmeshed with context, history, ambiguity, complicity; it is deeply political in the ways it opens up or closes down agency and the imagination. To offer a tender counterpoint of resistance, it might need to make way to other forms of sense-making, or play, or polyphony. Through its attentive and playful reading of voices, surfaces and textures, the project hopes to suggest new ways of moving through or being in space and in relation.

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.