Isabelle Sully

conceptual - publication - artistic research - performance - language

Isabelle Sully (1991, AU) is an artist, writer, curator and editor. Working with feminist histories in mind, she takes the mechanisms and materiality of administration as the main focus within her work, developing conceptual projects that span experimental writing, sculpture, performance, exhibition-making and publishing. She currently lives in Rotterdam where she is the founding editor of Unbidden Tongues, co-curator of Playbill and artistic director of A Tale of A Tub.

  • Portfolio
  • Activities
  • Awarded
  • Contact

    • If you stand close enough to the action, with a glass to the wall, you can hear the sound of teeth being gritted

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 14-03-2024 t/m 05-05-2024
    • Location: Jacqueline, Athens
    • An exhibition featuring Ranice Henderson Crosby, Brianna Leatherbury and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, curated by Isabelle Sully. With gritted teeth and within a feminist history of necessary self-reliance, the three divert energy, attention and resources, functionalizing their work on their own terms and finding escape routes from economic systems that fail them—all the while appearing otherwise compliant, their subversions ghostly and efficient.
    • https://jacqueline23.info/

    playbill

    Project

    • 01-03-2022
    • Location: Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam
    • Playbill is an event series curated by Martha Jager and Isabelle Sully at Torpedo Theater—a long-running, small-scale, thirty-seat theater in the heart of Amsterdam's city center. Drawing a connection to the theatre's history with print media, Playbill is an event-based project invested in the presentation of experimental language and text-based artistic works on the (small) stage.
    • https://www.isabelle-sully.com/playbill

    Unbidden Tongues

    Project

    • 01-01-2020
    • In collaboration with: Publication Studio Rotterdam
    • Location: Rotterdam, Rotterdam
    • Unbidden Tongues publishes previously produced yet relatively uncirculated work by cultural practitioners busy with questions surrounding civilization and civic life—particularly so in relation to language. Each title is staple bound, printed in black-and-white and made with the intention to keep production efforts low, easily reproducible and financially sustainable, so as to contribute as effectively as possible to a wider circulation of the work. It is edited by Isabelle Sully.
    • https://www.isabelle-sully.com/unbidden-tongues

    Assistant Curator

    Other

    • 01-03-2020
    • In collaboration with: Kunstverein, Amsterdam
    • Location: Hazenstraat 28, 1016SR, Amsterdam
    • Kunstverein is a not-for-profit membership organization, a curatorial experiment and functioning domestic franchise with branches in Amsterdam, New York, Toronto, and Milan.Kunstverein aims to show practices, attempts and failures, of avant-garde artists (all ages) who have been undersung in contemporary art history. By creating a critical pool and exploring public-private relationships, we reflect upon the manner in which cultural practices are traditionally administered.
    • www.kunstverein.nl

    Two In A Coffin

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 07-09-2019 t/m 06-10-2019
    • In collaboration with: Marwan
    • Location: Fokke Simonszstraat 12, 1017 TG, Amsterdam
    • Drawing its name from the history of the hospitalization of childbirth—where, when confronted with an exponential increase in the number of deaths during birth and in order to cover up this institutional unpreparedness and negligence, hospitals began burying women in pairs—Two In A Coffin is a two-person exhibition by Valentina Curandi and Isabelle Sully that steams from the artists' differing approaches to the effects of standardization on both the gendered body and artistic production.
    • https://www.isabelle-sully.com/two-in-a-coffin

    Transit Through Handshake

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 29-11-2018 t/m 23-12-2018
    • In collaboration with: The Physics Room
    • Location: The Arts Center Te Matatiki Toi Ora, Christchurch
    • Transit Through Handshake is an exhibition by Isabelle Sully that attempts to engage administration as a site of intervention. By taking a fictionalized female typist as its key protagonist and through including the work of Valentina Curandi and Anna Daučíková in supporting roles, it asks how we might come to think of the figure as someone who can reach in and breathe life into the protocols of administration .
    • https://www.isabelle-sully.com/transit-through-handshake

    Acknowledgments

      Scholarship

    • Mondriaan Fund

    • 2020
      Scholarship

    • Center for Visual Arts Rotterdam

    • 2020
      Scholarship

    • Amsterdam Fund for the Arts

    • 2019
      Scholarship

    • Center for Visual Arts Rotterdam

    • 2017
      Publication

    • The Space Conductors Are Among Us

    • 2021
    • P/////AKT, Amsterdam - P/////AKT, Amsterdam
      Publication

    • The Perpetual Citizen/The Perpetual Citizen

    • 2021
    • A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam - Isabelle Sully
      Publication

    • Unbidden Tongues #1: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt

    • 2020
    • Publication Studio Rotterdam - Isabelle Sully
      Publication

    • Unbidden Tongues #2: Karen Brodine

    • 2020
    • Publication Studio Rotterdam - Isabelle Sully
      Publication

    • Unbidden Tongues #3: Adrian Piper

    • 2021
    • Publication Studio Rotterdam - Isabelle Sully
      Publication

    • Unbidden Tongues #4: Janet McCalman

    • 2021
    • Publication Studio Rotterdam - Isabelle Sully