No Oxbridge Spires
Maud Sulter Born Glasgow, Scotland, UK (1960–2008) was an award-winning artist and writer, cultural historian, curator and gallerist of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in the UK.
Throughout her career and across different media, Maud Sulter interrogated the representation of black women in the histories of art, the media and photography, investigating the complex experiences of the African diaspora in European history and culture over the past six hundred years
This whole notion of the disappeared, I think, is something that runs through my work. I’m very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly black women’s experience and black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalized. So that it’s important for me as an individual, and obviously as a black woman artist, to put black women back in the centre of the frame – both literally within the photographic image, but also within the cultural institutions where our work operates
Maud Sulter, 'No Oxbridge Spires', 1994. Video Still. Courtesy and © Estate of Maud Sulter. Selected for AFI'24 by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland
Maud Sulter, 'No Oxbridge Spires', 1994. Video Still. Courtesy and © Estate of Maud Sulter. Selected for AFI'24 by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland
Maud Sulter, 'No Oxbridge Spires', 1994. Video Still. Courtesy and © Estate of Maud Sulter. Selected for AFI'24 by Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland
No Oxbridge Spires
Maud Sulter
Selected by Tramway, Glasgow
In No Oxbridge Spires, Maud Sulter takes us on a videoed meander through the Gorbals neighbourhood in Glasgow, accompanied by her mother Elsie, aunt Marjorie, and the artist’s two daughters Ama and Efie. Overlaying this footage with Maud’s short story of the same name (pub.1989) this journey, leads us through complex layers of biography, history, story, and diaspora that place black female experience alongside reflections on working class solidarity and identity and the politics of place. The film poignantly comes to rest outside Maud’s childhood home, now boarded up, condemned and slated to be demolished.