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.
Playbill - Playbill is an event series curated by Martha Jager and Isabelle Sully at Torpedo Theater—a long-running, small-scale, thirty-seat theatre in the heart of Amsterdam’s city centre. Originally founded by Het Parool, the Dutch national newspaper, the theatre has been committed to the spoken, written and performed word from the beginning. 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.
So far we have featured acts on Hetty Husiman, Sarah Schulman, Anna Daučíková & Helena Jiskrová, Mieko Shiomi, Itziar Okariz, Moniek Toebosch and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Image features our annual report publication, published at the end of 2023 and designed by Maud Vervenne.
The Lives Already Given to Work - Documentation from 'The Lives Already Given to Work', included as Part of 'The National 4: New Australian Art, in 2023. Composed of a series of experimental news bulletins voiced by leading Australian journalist Sandra Sully, 'The Lives Already Given To Work' is an audio work played at the top of each hour via the public announcement system of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA). Drawing a connection between different information distribution infrastructures found in the museum, the work plays on the role and history of media technologies and communication networks in women’s movements and questions the expectation of neutrality imposed upon the newsreader herself.
An Emergency Exit Sealed Shut - Documentation from 'An Emergency Exit Sealed Shut', an exhibition featuring Lou Hubbard and Alexis Hunter, curated by Isabelle Sully at Kunstverein, Amsterdam.
The Perpetual Citizen/De Blijvende Burger - The Perpetual Citizen is roaming a newsroom and newspaper first established in November 2020 at A Tale of A Tub in Rotterdam. Developed in the context of an art institution located in the centre of a modernist residential complex named after the founder of the first tabloid-style newspaper in the Netherlands, Justus van Effen, The Perpetual Citizen will continue on setting up temporary newsrooms in art spaces and publishing editions whenever and wherever seems fitting. Standing as both a news report and a report of audience engagement, the newspaper is especially interested in art spaces in residential areas—this immediate audience being the perpetual citizens, as it were.
Two In A Coffin - Drawing its name from the history of the hospitalisation 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 standardisation on both the gendered body and artistic production. In occupying the confined space of Marwan together, and through scoring a narrative around the administration of life and the management of death, a number of site-specific sound, text and performative works will be presented that concentrate on issues of safety, expression and policy as they relate to the protection of property.
Diligen_ was the word - Built on the backdrop of a series of Konrad Klapheck's typewriter paintings, Diligen_ was the word tells the story of a rogue administrator who uses her position of anonymity to disrupt the usual flow of things. It was exhibited as part of Transit Through Handshake, a solo exhibition held at the The Physics Room, Christchurch, from November 29 – December 23, 2018.
A settlement upon presumption - A settlement upon presumption is an ongoing work that navigates the transfer of property in various ways. Starting from the fictional character of Isabelle Kubíková—a combination of my first name and my mother's maiden name—it relies on the permanent application of plaques commemorating her (non)existence to possessions belonging to the site of exhibition. Drawing on marital property rights from Czechoslovakia, which were surprisingly collective (due to the Communist influence), the work sets the artist and the gallery in a relation of mutuality, whereby an agreement surrounding a transfer of ownership over the donated property must be arrived at together first. Through doing so, the work playfully inverts the historical denial of female ownership (both in name and in the material sense) as a way to incrementally build up a body of assets for Isabelle Kubíková herself.
A settlement upon presumption - A settlement upon presumption is an ongoing work that navigates the transfer of property in various ways. Starting from the fictional character of Isabelle Kubíková—a combination of my first name and my mother's maiden name—it relies on the permanent application of plaques commemorating her (non)existence to possessions belonging to the site of exhibition. Drawing on marital property rights from Czechoslovakia, which were surprisingly collective (due to the Communist influence), the work sets the artist and the gallery in a relation of mutuality, whereby an agreement surrounding a transfer of ownership over the donated property must be arrived at together first. Through doing so, the work playfully inverts the historical denial of female ownership (both in name and in the material sense) as a way to incrementally build up a body of assets for Isabelle Kubíková herself.
