Sophie Seita

Sophie Seita is an artist, researcher, and educator who uses writing, performance, screen-printing, installation, video, textiles, and sound in her multidisciplinary art practice. Her work is informed by deep listening, critical opacity, queer abstraction, and a playfulness that’s both rigorous and pleasurable.

Often working collaboratively and in community-centred contexts, she’s expanding and deepening her ongoing queer and decolonial art project with the musician Naomi Woo alongside other international artists, academics, activists, and writers, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.

Recent exhibitions, performances, talks, and workshops have found a home at Nottingham Contemporary, Matt’s Gallery, Mimosa House, Café Oto, UP Projects, Flat Time House, Rupert (Vilnius), Index (Stockholm), Grand Union, Ruta del Castor (Mexico City), Akademie der Künste (Berlin). Sophie teaches fine art at Goldsmiths, and her latest book, Lessons of Decal (87Press, 2023), is a queer meditation on reading and listening; the things and experiences that leave an imprint on us in unpredictable, messy, and desirous ways.

These Devices Became Law is a new performance and textile work by Sophie Seita that responds to historical utopias, their flaws and fault lines, and that hooks their far-away-ness to the here and now of material reality. In the process, it interrogates and imagines

deconstructed geographies, impossible maps, utopian maps, tender maps, indecipherable maps—the gauze that dresses a wound.

 The work is situated within a larger project on queer performance scores that uses artistic research, experimental drawing, social practice, and somatic workshops, developed in dialogue with Creative Darlington, Darlington Library, Curious Arts, and Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Photo Credit: Christa Holka, 2023