Curators must love a dead artist. Their story has a beginning, a middle and an end. The trouble with the living is that they are unpredictable. They insist on doing their own thing. Their new work often undermines the old. They might even get cancelled. It is far better to work with the dead.

Maud Sulter, who died from cancer in 2008 at the age of 47, is everywhere at the moment. Her work is featured prominently in Tate Britain’s The 80s: Photographing Britain as it was in the recent surveys Women in Revolt and The Ignorant Art School.

In these exhibitions, Sulter is presented as a radical artist who recentred black women in the canon of European history. Her lush Cibachrome portraits of contemporary black women as Greek muses, Zabat (1989), confront the viewer with what it means to be culturally invisible. Sulter’s work prefigures the reckoning that took place after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, a moment when many curators were forced to confront their unconscious biases. I don’t know how long it takes to curate a show from start to finish1, but it makes sense that, four years on, Tramway would be celebrating Sulter’s work in her home town of Glasgow.

You are my kindred spirit is currently the main exhibition in the cavernous T2 hall. It is an enormous space that presents enormous challenges. Yet Tramway has had success in recent years with a Turner prize-winning show by Jasleen Kaur and celebrated installations by Delaine Le Bas and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. These installations impressed in how they used the warehouse’s vertical dimensions through sculpture. But how do you occupy such a space with a photographer? The answer is to turn the work into an immersive art show.

While I don’t fetishise the analogue, I am not yet ready to go all-in on digital. For instance, I’ve never been to one of the many Van Gogh experiences that are touring the globe. Nor do I have any interest in seeing ABBA’s digital avatars dancing on stage. Yet, in a world where people spend most of their waking hours staring at a screen, the idea of consuming a digital projection is increasingly popular.

Superficially, You are my kindred spirit is a retrospective, but there is no original work, there is nothing that touched the hand of Maud Sulter. It is a digital extrapolation with the photographs remade as C-type prints or projections on the wall. It is this work of digitisation that allows the work to be blown up to fit the space.

The curators, Claire Jackson and Alexander Storey Gordon, have done a superb job creating a reverent atmosphere through moody lighting and a blood-red wall. Indeed, the most beguiling part of the exhibition is the translucent drapery hanging from the high ceilings that shimmer in the light. These fabrics are printed with documentation photos from an exhibition in Preston where the original work has been lost and are accompanied by the sound of Maud Sulter’s voice echoes the words of her Alba Sonnets (1995) from six nearby speakers.

Memories of Childhood (1993) consists of rephotographed photos of Sulter's childhood snapshots. In the Tramway version, these are grainy with pixelated artefacts and stuck onto boards. As someone who rarely prints photos, I am in no position to complain, but the finish of these new versions of her work is awful.

I was in London recently and had the chance to compare the digital renders with the originals. The original versions feature chalk writing on the frame that refers to events contemporaneous with when the photo was taken: the Mexico Olympics, and the Black Panthers. Without such writing, the work lacks the important juxtapositional tension that is the hallmark of Sulter's work.

Elsewhere, Syrcas (1993) consists of a projected slideshow of collages. Here, there is no patina of the artist’s handiwork, nothing to suggest that the images were roughly cut out. Likewise, confined along the back wall are the self-portraits inspired by Charles Baudelaire's muse, Jeanne Duval. These are rendered as lifeless projections in the gloom, although thanks to digital algorithms they look pretty good when rephotographed on my phone.

Can we just reduce photography to pixels? Unlike painting, which has a three-dimensional quality on the canvas, photography better lends itself to digital production. But how much aura can a photograph transmit as a thumbnail or a projection? Is a photograph all content and no form? Walter Benjamin assumed so when he talked about the loss of aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. However, it seems to me that a great print can make all the difference in giving an aura of presence, craft, and care.

Take the recent exhibition of Peter Hujar's photographs at Raven Row. Hujar wrote in his will that only his friend Gary Schneider was allowed to print new copies of his work. Each picture is the same size and has a similar tonal range. The effect is mesmerising and creates images with a distinct aura. Likewise, there is an aura in Sulter’s original prints in Tate Britain which felt slightly battered by time. Maybe this is all in my mind, but the digital versions seem absolutely dead by comparison.

Tramway has gone to great pains to confirm that all these works were produced in collaboration with the Maud Sulter Estate. If liberties are being taken with the work, it is done by those who are empowered to do so. However, it is unclear which individuals make up the Estate. Presumably, Sulter's two daughters play a part, but I am curious if any of her garlanded peers like Ingrid Pollard, Lubaina Himid, or Ajamu X are involved. It is not inconceivable, and if they are going to recreate and adapt her works, it might help our understanding of this new work.

The exhibition is impressive and uses the space well, I can’t help but feel it does a disservice to Sulter’s photographs. By repurposing them so brazenly in projections, blown up on boards, and even printed on diaphanous sheets, the aura is diminished. It reduces the photographs to political narratives that need to be explained in long blocks of text.2

Once someone’s dead, should we respect the scarcity of the work they created or turn them into a multimedia spectacle?

Maud Sulter - You are my kindred spirit is showing at Tramway until 30th March 2025

2

Even for a contemporary art exhibition, there is a lot of text to read. Here are a couple of examples: