Sophie Seita
Staff details
Sophie Seita is an artist who uses language as a material within and across performance, books, videos, sound, textiles, and installation. Her work has been commissioned, supported, performed, and published internationally, most recently, by the Roberts Institute of Art and Hunterian Museum in Glashow; Ma Bibliothèque; Queer Art Projects; Canada Council for the Arts; British Council; UP Projects; Literarisches Colloquium Berlin; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; JNU (New Delhi); the 87 Press; Stanford University Press; and others.
Academic qualifications
- PhD 2016
- MPhil 2012
Research interests
Research Interests:
• Lecture-performances, poetic essays, video essays, and practice-based research
• Avant-garde groups and histories of visual art, poetry, and performance
• Feminist, queer, trans studies, affect theory, disability studies, deaf studies
• Speculative approaches to archives and history-writing; fictional collectives
• Concepts of play, difficulty, opacity, silliness, ornamentation, deep listening
• Theories and practices of translation and multilingualism across literatures, cultures, and borders
• Environmental research through community co-creation
Creative curiosities:
opacity, playfulness, difficulty, artifice, queer abstraction, weird things, small things, minor genres, but also ornamentation, the decorative, the baroque, the exuberant, language bubbling over, mud, muddiness, swimming in it (in language, in language as excess), tactility, materiality beyond objects, the materiality of language, listening, listening beyond 'hearing', listening with the body, things falling in and out of place, being confused, being surprised, leaning into and revelling in ambiguity, ambivalence, silliness, joyously not-making sense, non-linear narratives, provisional ideas, finding the complex in the simple and vice versa, archives (historical/material and imagined/immaterial)
Publications and research outputs
Article
Seita, Sophie. 2023. 'A Laboratory of Sensations': Listening for Texture. OEI: Aural Poetics, 98-99, pp. 125-139. ISSN 1404-5095
Seita, Sophie. 2022. Playing with Knowledge: On Lecture Performances. TDR/The Drama Review, 66(3), pp. 78-95. ISSN 1054-2043
Seita, Sophie. 2021. My Lazy Laboratory. Rupert Journal, 1,
Seita, Sophie. 2017. Tom Raworth's Little Magazines: Outburst, Before Your Very Eyes!, and Infolio. Critical Quarterly, 59(2), pp. 11-33. ISSN 0011-1562
Seita, Sophie. 2017. Thinking the unprintable in contemporary post-digital publishing. Chicago Review, 60/61(4/1), pp. 175-194. ISSN 0009-3696
Book
Seita, Sophie. 2019. Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503608719
Performance
Seita, Sophie. 2023. Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs). In: "Mud: The Urgency of the Arts", Royal College of Art, United Kingdom, 30 March 2023.
Seita, Sophie and Woo, Naomi. Beethoven Was a Lesbian. In: "Beethoven Was a Lesbian", Cafe OTO, United Kingdom, 2019-2022.
Show/Exhibition
Seita, Sophie. 2022. There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body. In: "There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body", Hoxton253, United Kingdom, 4-26 February 2022.
