After being postponed from 2020, Ella Sutherland’s residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin commences in November 2022 and runs until October 2023.
Sutherland’s residency culminates in an exhibition, titled Argot, presented at the Künstlerhaus from 07 - 30 July 2023; a new body of work that considers the possibilities and the vulnerabilities of communication. Informing this work is an appreciation of social histories and the formal, material and technological conditions of language. Sutherland has also experimented with conventions of mechanical reproduction – such as DIN Standards, German type design and Letterpress printing – to explore alternate modes of utilizing systems that have often excluded or controlled that which is not immediately legible. The objects and texts referenced by Sutherland are multiple; they reach back through time, connecting the archaic and modern with the present. Sutherland’s work is often informed by research in specialist archives, and in the case of Argot, by early lesbian-feminist serial publications held by Berlin’s Schwules Museum.
Read the artist's interview with Creative New Zealand from the start of her residancy here:
