This posthumous exhibition, created with the estate of Scottish-Ghanaian artist Maud Sulter, who died in 2008 aged 47, feels so timely that’s it’s surprising that a major Scottish gallery hasn’t taken on this project before. (The 2015 show Maud Sulter: Passion, at Street Level in Glasgow, was a great success, but mostly limited to her photography and photomontage.) Sulter’s practice was in so many ways predictive of the phase of cultural and artistic history that we are living through. In its exploration of hybrid and marginalised identities, its concern with retelling dominant stories of European art history, its embrace of audio-visual formats and installation to allow a focus on lived experience and testimony.

Sulter was exploring all these themes and forms before the seismic shifts of the last decade or so, and as far back as the 1980s. Lubaina Himid, a frequent collaborator, included Sulter’s work in The Thin Black Line, a groundbreaking show held at the ICA in 1986 featuring work by 11 Black women artists. The decade or so that followed was the most prolific phase of the artist’s truncated career, with photography becoming her best-known medium, though poetry, video, collage, and installation were all embraced too, as this show makes clear.

Much of the work created at that time took as its source material Sulter’s working-class childhood in Glasgow, where she was raised by a white Scottish mother, one of Glasgow’s last tram drivers. In the film 'No Oxbridge Spires' (1998), the camera follows members of the family across the city’s residential southern districts, tracking a perambulatory course back to the artist’s now-boarded up childhood home. 'Memories of Childhood' (1993), meanwhile, consists of a series of rephotographed family-archive snaps (tears and stains on the original prints are magnified in the process, like traces of historical distance). If 'No Oxbridge Spires' tells a story familiar from white working-class histories, this arrangement captures the complexities of growing up mixed-race in 1960s urban Scotland. Several of the shots feature exotic animals. Sulter smiles in her pram with a parrot perched on the edge. White children gazing at a black Sun Bear standing on its hind legs in Edinburgh Zoo.

Maud’s Ghanaian father was only encountered upon his death, during funeral rites in his home country captured in the intense and moving film 'My Father’s House' (1996). At one point, the camera focuses for a lengthy period on the paternal body in its coffin, as if embodied ancestry were being explored with an unflinching scrutiny. Two portrait photographs close by this work show the artist’s white and African grandfathers in near identical poses, as if entwining the two strands of biographical narrative threaded through the show.

All of these pieces combine a visual or moving-image element with a poetic or reflective voice- over, rooting the works in the literary world to which Sulter was also intimately connected. This multi-media format is repeated across the exhibition, but elsewhere a more expansive literary-and art-historical perspective is adopted. 'Syrcas' (1993) is a stand-out series, a set of surrealistic photo-montages which place images of plundered African artworks over sublime European landscapes and Renaissance court portraiture. There is a multi-layered interrogation here of the ways in which white imperialism and its cultural analogues have literally and figuratively erased Black stories from history.

Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit, install image by Keith Hunter

Elsewhere, female personae become the optic through which such histories are reclaimed. In 'Les Bijoux', Sulter sits for a series of large-scale Polaroid self-portraits with a necklace reminiscent of that worn by Baudelaire’s muse Jeane Duval, a Haitian Creole woman whom the poet called his “black Venus”, and who became an image of exoticised sexuality in the Frenchman’s proto-modernist verse. Sulter’s gaze, unlike that of the muse-as-object, is empowered and interrogatory.

In a similar vein, the shocking film-piece 'Plantatio'n (1995) alludes to the character of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre (1847), the original “mad woman in the attic”, an archetype of pathologised black feminine emotion to intersectional feminists (partly thanks to Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which retells her story). A voice-over musing on the character is combined with live footage of the artist having womb surgery. The film approaches body horror in its visceral detail, striking a slightly odd tonal note in relation to the rest of the show. But it forces viewers to consider the metaphorical violence of narratives around non-white female bodies, and also speaks to ideas of trauma and healing, given that the surgery in question was a pioneering form of “womb-replacement” proffered as an alternative to full hysterectomy.

Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit, install image by Keith Hunter

The curators have worked within a set of tricky formal constraints, including the great light-sensitivity of some of Sulter’s photographs, and the loss of some of her exhibition pieces, to create installations which add further layers of representation and reframing to the spectacle of Sulter’s life and work. The version of 'The Alba Sonnets' shown here, for example, combine her poem of the same name – concerning the two Black women who were courtiers to James IV of Scotland – with photographs of the early-1990s exhibition in Preston which the verse accompanied. Many of the installation elements of that show have been lost, so these images, projected onto long fabric hangings, create a sense of a biography at once erased and conjured back to life. The technique sums up the whole tone of the show, which is sensitive, skilfully rendered, and historically significant. 

Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit is showing at Tramway until 30th March 2025