[ ELIZABETH ] EFUA SUTHERLAND

Performative Installations

Elizabeth Efua Sutherland works mainly across performance and theatre, and lately has been exploring new fields, media, and materials. She is increasingly concerned with interactivity, video, sculpture and texture in making performance/performative objects. 

She holds a in BA Theatre from DePauw University (2009-2013) and an MA in Contemporary Performance Making from Brunel University London (2015-2016). She lives and works in Accra, Ghana.

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Her interests lie in the construction of contemporary African cultural narrative, how bodies host narratives, how these can hold & transfer power; and also how these narratives manifest as belief/interweave into the fabric of daily life of individuals and communities on the continent. Using concepts of myth making (processes of constructing epics for the modern world that are grounded in both historical and contemporary folkloric and fantastical storytelling traditions), she hopes to widen the cosmographical awareness of Ghanaian traditional rituals, gods, and folk monsters by unearthing and re-presenting familiar tales as embodied experiences and as physical artefacts that can work their way into popular consciousness.

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Over the last four years, she has been an artist in residence at the Zurcher Theatre Spektakel (2014); at the Google Cultural Institute Paris, as part of a residency organized by 89Plus, co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets with Julie Boukobza (2016); at the Villa Empain, under the directorship of Asad Raza (2017); at the Harn Museum of Art/Centre for African Studies at the University of Florida (2017). In 2016, she was also nominated for the Absolut Art Award.

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She has participated in group shows in museum and institutional settings with ANO Cultural Institute at Dak’Art (Dakar, Senegal) in 2014; with 89Plus at the LUMA Foundation (Zurich, Switzerland) in 2015.