Maud Sulter

23 November 2024 to 30 March 2025
Preview Friday 22 November, 7pm to 9pm

An immersive exhibition by the Scottish-Ghanaian poet, artist, photographer, writer, curator, gallerist and publisher Maud Sulter (1960 – 2008). Curated in collaboration with the Maud Sulter Estate, the exhibition showcases the artist's rarely exhibited moving image and spoken word archives. 

Born in the Gorbals, close to Tramway, Maud Sulter began her career as a writer and award-winning poet, expanding her practice to include photography and visual art. Sulter was also an activist, curator and organiser, contributing significantly to the cultural landscape through her exhibitions, publishing and curatorial initiatives. Her expansive, multi-faceted practice sought to claim space for Black Artists and address the erasure and representation of Black Women in the histories of art, the media and photography.  

Sulter described herself as Glaswegian Ghanaian and much of the exhibition at Tramway explores her family archive. Sulter constantly returned to her family album to retrieve both happy and disquieting memories of growing up in Scotland, as in the work Memories of childhood (1993). The exhibition also features photographs of Sulter’s mother Elsie, one of Glasgow’s last tram conductors who would have spent time in the Tramway gallery in its former life as the Coplaw Tram Depot.

Voice is central to the exhibition and Sulter's spoken word soundworks such as The Alba Sonnets feature her own distinctive voice. Finely honed in her poetry, we hear her relish for words, sounds, juxtapositions, for Scots dialect and archaic vocabulary across the exhibition. Sulter also summons the voice of others, and gives voice to women whose lives have been unrecorded or marginalised. 

Sulter devoted her career to forging new platforms for artists and her remarkable body of work continues to inspire as an active legacy and inheritance for artists working today. This exhibition celebrates Maud Sulter’s work as a ‘living archive’, featuring a dynamic live programme of events, curated by researcher and writer Pelumi Odubanjo, over the course of the exhibition. 

Header image: Maud Sulter, Self-portrait, 2001-2, large format Polaroid © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow