GSA Exhibitions Timeline (3): Susannah Thompson, ‘Speak English’, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, 2002

Dr Susannah Thompson is Head of Doctoral Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. A previous role for her at GSA was as Exhibitions Assistant. Here she recollects a number of exhibitions she worked on, including the Newbery Gallery exhibition ‘Speak English’, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, that ran 12-31 Oct 2002. 

In October 2002 I was working as Exhibitions Assistant at Glasgow School of Art in a department of two. The programme was run by the artist and curator Kathy Chambers, a graduate of the Sculpture Department and Exhibitions Officer at GSA between 1990 and 2006. There was a certain pattern and routine to the job, and many of the exhibitions we organised at the time, constrained by a tiny budget, were fairly pedestrian – the usual raft of fixed, annual departmental exhibitions, touring exhibitions or sponsored ‘prize’ shows. In between these obligations, though, Kathy managed to present some of the most idiosyncratic, specialist and imaginative exhibitions to be seen in Scotland at that time.

The exhibitions I was involved with ranged from original research on obscure historical subjects, such as George Rawson’s brilliant exhibition on the life and work of Charles Heath Wilson in 2000, or the Goethe Institut’s exhibition on the work of Eckhart Muthesius in India in 2001, to exhibitions of studio-fresh work by GSA students and exhibitions by iconic artists, architects and designers such as Lucienne Day (2003) and CJ Lim (2004). In 2001, Argentine printmaker Ral Veroni displayed Lucha Por la Vida, a collection of artist’s books and prints, in the unique setting of the Mackintosh Library. Another highlight was art and design collective Lapland’s response to the work of the painter James McNeill Whistler in 2003’s Green Margarine.

One of the most memorable projects during my tenure as Exhibitions Assistant, however, was Speak English, an exhibition by Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter. The exhibition was held in the Newbery Gallery, an open, walk-through exhibition space on the ground floor of the concrete-clad, seven storey Newbery Tower (demolished in 2011 to make way for the Reid Building). Speak English brought together two distinct bodies of existing work, Ånd: Inside the Invisible (2001) by Himid and Proverbs for Adwoa by Sulter (1992), to form a reconfigured joint exhibition.

The show was scheduled to coincide with a city-wide programme organised to accompany the Culture, Gender, Power conference held at the University of Strathclyde. It acted as a direct response to exhortations of right-wing commentators that people resident in the UK should ‘speak English’, (while pointedly aiming such statements at immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers). As Sulter and HImid noted in a text written for the exhibition, such statements imply that ‘all you have to do to be left to live a peaceful life in Scotland is to conform, to speak English.’ The work of both artists reflected the way in which language can become a site of power: what it means to have a voice, the privileging of speech over touch and sight, how language can be weaponised, and what it means to silence and be silenced.

The text and image photoworks which formed Sulter’s Proverbs for Adwoa were intended to destabilise the viewer by exploring the social lives of African objects. First shown at Bernice Steinbaum in New York City in 1993, images of akua’ba fertility figures were shown with proverbs incised into copper plates alongside. Fetish depicted circumcision masks, accompanied by metal labels incised with words such as ‘sharp’ and ‘rusty’. In the later GSA incarnation of these works, Sulter added red tissue paper, further emphasising the bloody violence of FGM. The gold weights of Proverbs for Kobena, like the other objects, refused to conform to the status of ‘aesthetic’ object, countering a decontextualized, museological gaze. As the art historian Deborah Cherry noted, ‘displayed in museums as trophies, these fragments are allowed to ‘speak English’ through labels which re-classify them. How are they to speak in their new lives?’ Bridging the decade since the works were produced, the GSA exhibition also included a special edition of Sulter’s 2002 play Service to Empire, a narrative based on the Scots-Ghanaian heritage and life of JJ Rawlings, former President of Ghana, published to coincide with Sulter’s new imprint A19/ Atelier 19. Sulter also included a new photographic triptych, Akwambo: A Good Spirit Always Looks after her Young (2001) a series of large-format Polaroid photographs now part of the Scottish Parliament collection. The portraits show Sulter herself, a portrait of ballet dancer (and lon-gtime collaborator and musician) Miles Ofonso, and in the centre an image of a fertility doll. With the photoworks, texts and plates, the exhibition exemplified Sulter’s ability to move seamlessly between disciplines and forms, and demonstrated her ability to make art that was both explicitly political and formally poetic.

Himid’s Ånd: Inside the Invisible was originally conceived and installed in a former 17th century leprosy hospital, St Jorgen’s, in Bergen, Norway in 2001. It consisted of one hundred small paintings, of which sixty were exhibited in the GSA incarnation the following year. While almost eradicated in the rest of Europe in the 19^th century, leprosy persisted in Norway and it was a Norwegian doctor who discovered the bacterium which caused it in 1873. Often assumed to be a long-gone, biblical disease, leprosy is still endemic in certain parts of the world, a reminder of global inequality. In his recent essay Behind the leprosarium gates, the writer Oliver Basciano wrote movingly of the residents of Tichilești, Europe’s last leprosarium on the border between Romania and the Ukraine. The essay called to mind Himid’s earlier project, which similarly attempted to represent the small, everyday details lives loved behind the walls of St Jorgen’s Hospital, whose last residents remained there until 1946. Like Sulter, Himid used the juxtaposition of text and image to powerful effect. Her ‘luggage labels’ were small handwritten lines in English and Norwegian which accompanied each painting and became poignant titles for them. For Himid, ‘the paintings are talismans as if each person had a piece of fabric sewn into his/her jacket and this reminded them of who they really were before the disease.’

In addition to these works, Himid presented The Signalling Negro (1996), her response to Gericault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. In Himid’s version only the standing, signalling figure remains, looking towards the coast of Mauritania. The overlaid text reads ‘THE SIGNALLING NEGRO ON THE RAFT OF tHe MEDUSA DID nOT USE WORDs’, a further allusion to the title of the exhibition – here, where words are useless, gesture becomes crucial. It has a particularly affecting resonance today in its resemblance to media images of migrant rafts.

The work of both artists reflected on aspects of the way one culture is integrated into another: the linked histories of Scotland and Scandinavia, of Scotland and Africa, the paradoxical circulation and consumption of objects, and the dialogues that can be generated between painting and photography, spoken and written language, images and text, visual and material form.