‘Drawing Room at 20’ Artists’ Reflections: Louise Despont & Suzanne Treister

‘Drawing Room at 20’ Artists’ Reflections: Louise Despont & Suzanne Treister

Online Talk Tue 15 March 2022

In 2022, Drawing Room celebrates its 20th birthday. To mark the anniversary we are looking back at momentous exhibitions from our recent and more distant past and talking to the artists and contributors who made them happen, examining the centrality of drawing to creative practice from the perspective of artists. In the second of this yearlong series we look back to the exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium (2020), a major exhibition of artists and works inspired by mediumistic methodologies and their deep cultural history.

This online event features participating artists Louise Despont & Suzanne Treister who will be in conversation with Not Without My Ghosts co-curator Lars Bang Larsen.

Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist as Medium is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, developed in partnership with Drawing Room, London, and curated by Lars Bang Larsen, Simon Grant and Marco Pasi. Touring to Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, it will open at its final destination Millennium Gallery, Sheffield 31 March – 26  June 2022.

About the speakers: 

Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian and curator, and director of artistic research at Art Hub Copenhagen. Together with Simon Grant and Marco Pasi he was a curator of Not Without my Ghosts: The Artist as Medium at Drawing Room, 2020 touring to Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea and Millennium Gallery, Sheffield.

Louise Despont received her BA in Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2006. Her work has been presented internationally in public and private venues including The Drawing Center, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; VI,VII, Oslo; Petit Palais, Paris; The Museum of Arts and Design; New York; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Galerie Isa, Mumbai; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York; Foxy Production, New York; and Ibid Projects, London, among numerous others. She is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NYC and Galerie Isa, Mumbai. The artist is the recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Weston Price Film Award from Brown University, Princess Grace Grant recipient and is a MacDowell fellow. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern art, New York, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, the RISD Museum, Providence, RI and the U.S. Embassy Collection. She lives and works in Mallorca, Spain.

Born 1958 London, Suzanne Treister lives and works between London and the French Pyrenees. Graduated from Brighton Polytechnic (1978); St Martins School of Art (1981); and Chelsea School of Art (1982). Treister was a pioneer in the new media field from the early 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing avatars and fictional worlds. Her recent projects include HEXEN 2.0, HFT The Gardener, SURVIVOR (F) and The Escapist Black Hole Spacetime. An ongoing focus of her work is the relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity.