Lou Lou Sainsbury

audiovisual - installation - performance - sculpture - autobiographical

Lou Lou Sainsbury (b. 1994) is an artist working across film, live performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. She identifies as a time traveler, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into tricksterish dreamscapes, exploring queer activisms, community and ecological entanglement. She often works in collaboration, developing intimate long term research-led projects guided by improvisation, cinematic processes and sonic thinking.

Sainsbury's work questions how we can become better listeners, exploring transfeminine experience as a social process of finding resonance and dissonance within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. Rooted in friendships and everyday life, haunted and heartfelt, or humorous and uncompromising, her work seeks to imagine transformative stories for more liberated futures. She received her MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute in 2021 and her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016. She was previously an associate artist at Open School East in 2017.

  • Portfolio
  • Activities
  • Contact

    • Museum Night 010: Rapture

    Performance

    • 02-03-2024
    • Location: Worm, Rotterdam
    • A night of performances with Shasti, Gabi Dao, XI3LLA, Lou Lou Sainsbury. Personas and semi-fictional characters create ruptures between metaphysical, astrological, paranormal and elemental worlds, including a performance and screening of A Fantastic Body (2024). Curated by Ratri Notosurdirdjo.
    • https://worm.org/production/museumnacht-010-shake-hands-with-the-city/

    We'll Be Your Mirror

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 20-01-2024 t/m 17-02-2024
    • In collaboration with: Ehrlich Steinberg, LA and Condo, London
    • Location: Herald St, London
    • A group exhibition featuring works with Markus Amm, Alexandra Bircken, Josh Brand, Beth Collar, Coleman Collins, Michael Dean, Trix and Robert Haussmann, Emi Mizukami, Joan Nelson, Joel Otterson, Lou Lou Sainsbury, and Jeffrey Stuker.
    • https://www.heraldst.com/condo-london-2024

    A Cloud That Bites

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 08-01-2024 t/m 22-02-2024
    • In collaboration with: Amarte Fund, Mondriaan Fund
    • Location: Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles
    • The solo exhibition includes a newly commissioned multi-channel video installation, sculpture, photography and drawing. Constructed around two semi-fictionalized characters - Sunbeam and Fowelley - A Cloud That Bites moves between a historical and imagined past of trans histories, speaking to passages of life and death, resurrection/revival, communion, possessions and invocations, exploring the transformative properties of a body that lives in and of the weather.
    • https://www.ehrlichsteinberg.com/a-cloud-that-bites

    the hallway ends with changed minds

    Performance

    • 01-12-2023
    • Location: Perdu, Amsterdam
    • An evening of literary readings and performances, featuring my performance General Feeling – a sonically transformative love letter to an alien within, based on rewritten stories from Richard Von Kraft Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis.
    • https://perdu.nl/agenda/de-gang-mondt-uit-gedachten-veranderd/

    Mutant Sensualities

    Workshop

    • 30-06-2023
    • Location: Reading Room Rotterdam, Buitenplaats Brienenoord, Rotterdam
    • How can writing be transformative to our bodies? Reading Room Rotterdam landed at Eiland Brienenoord to host Mutant Sensualities led by Lou Lou Sainsbury. A speculative-fiction writing and foraging workshop exploring how sensual experience can help us rethink and reimagine our troubled relationships to more-than-human-worlds
    • https://readingroomrotterdam.hotglue.me/?Mutant%20Sensualities

    DESCENDING NOTES / LIKE RAIN IN THE ABYSS

    Exhibition / presentation

    descending notes

    Exhibition / presentation

    Earth is a dead name

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 06-06-2022 t/m 18-09-2022
    • In collaboration with: Humber Street Gallery, Freelands Foundation
    • Location: Gasworks, London
    • Earth is a Deadname is a constellation of work that seeks to reimagine transgender experience beyond the limiting language of medicalization, rewriting its histories into a cosmic poetics of trans sensuality, relationship and desire. Comprising film, sound, stained-glass installation, sculpture and live-performance, the exhibition features collaborations with the artists Ada M. Patterson, Kari Rosenfeld and Raffia Li.
    • https://www.gasworks.org.uk/exhibitions/earth-is-a-deadname/

    Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme

    Residencies / exchange

    • 01-07-2021 t/m 20-09-2021
    • In collaboration with: Freelands Foundation
    • Location: Gasworks, London
    • In 2021 I was awarded the Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme, consisting of a 3 month residency and touring solo exhibition at Gasworks, London and Humber Street Gallery, Hull in 2022-2023.
    • https://www.gasworks.org.uk/residencies/lou-lou-sainsbury/

    my hole is the place where i call myself a mother

    Exhibition / presentation

    • 19-09-2020 t/m 02-10-2020
    • Location: Well Projects, Margate
    • A solo exhibition by Lou Lou Sainsbury, produced in collaboration with music by Marie Tučkovà and performance by Sarjon, and curated by Kris Lock. Drawing on research into colonial histories, Christian iconography, holes and trans motherhood, Lou Lou Sainsbury presents a multidisciplinary installation that extends through waxy poetics and knotted, spiraling time forms as a distillation of historical consciousness and an allegory for love, caring and listening.
    • https://wellprojects.xyz/exhibitions/my-hole-is-the-place-where-i-call-myself-a-mother/

    The Future Is Now - Tate Lates

    Performance

    • 17-10-2019
    • Location: Tate Modern, London
    • An evening of performance, workshops and discussions, featuring my performance 1667: Not Alive, Just Living (2019). A video installation and performed exorcism to ignite the spirits of Arthur Coga – a late recipient to the 17th century non-human to human blood transfusions of the French physician, Jean-Baptiste Denis, who made numerous attempts to transfer the spirit of the lamb ( via blood) into sick human patients to heal them.
    • https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/olafur-eliasson/future-near

    Acknowledgments

      Scholarship

    • Mondriaan Funds - Artist Start

    • 2023
      Scholarship

    • Amarte Fund

    • 2022
      Pricing

    • Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme

    • 2021
      Publication

    • How to Sleep Faster #13 - Empathetic Earth

    • 2022
    • journal
    • Arcadia Missa Publications - Ruth Pilston
      Publication

    • Metamorphosis: On future bodies and living identities

    • 2021
    • Online Zine
    • New Vide -
      Publication

    • Love Spells and Rituals for Another World

    • 2021
    • journal
    • Independent Publisher Network - Lilly Markaki and Caroline Harris
      Publication

    • Transsexualities

    • 2023
    • journal
    • Almanac Journal Of Trans Poetics -
      Publication

    • zweikommasieben #27 - A Cloud that Bites

    • 2023
    • Shops
    • zweikommasieben -