Notice Board

Art NOW presents Isabelle Sully, in collaboration with Southern Alberta Art Gallery
Performance Appraisal
March 5, 2021 | 12 pm MST
uLethbridge Online Presentation

In this lecture artist, writer and editor Isabelle Sully will present a series of recent projects that all take writing as a primary mode of thinking. Through combining administrative mechanisms—like the evaluation form, the audit report, the safety measure and the policy document—with techniques of performance—such as characterisation, the script, the monologue or the stand-in performer—her body of work locates itself in ‘paratextual’ elements of artistic production, an approach through which she tries to find ways to take language off the page and make it implementable. In continuing this approach, she will conduct a performance appraisal within the lecture, addressing the successes and failures of recent works and the role of the artist as employee—and will conclude the presentation with the standard discussion section of a performance appraisal, this time taking the form of the Q&A.

Isabelle Sully (1991, AU) is an artist, editor and writer. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work. After moving from Melbourne to undertake a Masters degree at the Dutch Art Institute in 2015, she now lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues. Her involvement with the administrative sphere of institutional practice also plays out in her current role as assistant curator at Kunstverein, Amsterdam. 

Image: Isabelle Sully, The Perpetual Citizen, 2021–ongoing, newspaper template, plaque, temporary newsroom and resulting newspaper, 43.2  x 29.7 x 0.5cm. Photo credit: Pilar Mata Dupont.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.