Shit Show 2025

Archival art print with hand colouring laid to cotton

Duck canvas

109 x 90cm

Sue Pam-Grant views her transdisciplinary practice as processual

For her, painting, drawing, and writing are all “performances of the line,” and her art performances extend drawing into an immersive, durational act in public

When she creates books or writes, she crosses a divide in art criticism between writing and performing: Writing is of the mind; performance is of the body; writing is private, performance is public

She views these disciplinary transgressions as the type of feminine / feminist irruption that theorist Hélène Cixous characterizes as a Dionysian laugh at Apollonian order

It has a politics

Across three decades, Pam-Grant’s practice has moved fluidly between visual art, theatre, film, and text

She has written and co-written more than ten plays and continues to write, act, direct, and adapt theatrical works

Her video works, “Daily Serial: The Multiple View,” “Bach: Lost In Pronunciation,” and “War-Pigeon Posting” explore the body, archive, and erasure through lens-based media

For Sue Pam-Grant, when art, an interdisciplinary practice, meets the intersubjective practice of psychoanalysis, the private and personal become public and take material form, transecting the psychoanalytic boundary between Self and Other

She cites as a key influence Louise Bourgeois, who was in psychoanalysis for thirty-five years until her therapist died, and said that art was a parallel form of psychoanalysis that gave her direct access to her subconscious

Paralleling her studio practice, Sue Pam-Grant provides on online MasterClass program in which participants combine drawing with psychoanalytic processes

The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute hosted Sue Pam-Grant’s “Crazy Moths Performance Encounter” in November 2024

A “meditation on the artist’s process,” this work combines art and performance, the psychoanalytical space and the studio setting, in “a thoughtful and intense rendering of Louise Bourgeois,” as RoseLee Goldberg, art historian of performance art and the founder of Performa, NYC, said

First performed in 2023 at The Baxter Theatre, Cape Town for 24 performances, it was adapted into a six-week immersive residency at the South African National Gallery in July/August 2024, and then presented at Stellenbosch Toyota Wordfees 2024, where it was nominated for Best Solo Performance

Collaboration is a fertile field for exploring the terrain between Self and Other

Sue Pam-Grant’s critically acclaimed performance career includes longstanding artistic collaboration with William Kentridge

In 2008, she suggested Kentridge perform in his own work, and then directed Kentridge’s first performed lecture, I am not me, the Horse is not mine, which featured at MoMA in 2010 and traveled widely

Subsequent participation in Kentridge’s projects as performer and maker include HouseBoy (REDCAT Theatre, 2022 and Brown Arts Institute, 2024), O Sentimental Machine (2015 Istanbul Biennale), and multiple seasons at Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea

In January 2025, Sue Pam-Grant embarked on a daily exchange of drawings with Japanese artist Yoshi Ikeya

Titled 14,734 Dots Between, for the distance between Cape Town and Tokyo, the project was sparked when she discovered on Instagram a drawing he had posted of wind-tossed washing hanging on a line that was strikingly like one of her own

Discovering a profound connection in their practices, daily each responded to the other’s transmission in a psychodynamic, tactile process that blurred the lines between Self and Other, creator and creation

The collaboration culminated in a two-day experimental performance encounter and exhibition in Tokyo in June 2025, titled “Beyond Red: 14,734 Dots Between Us”

Her most recent works raise presence and duration against the backdrop of Japanese perspectives on transience and unrepeatability

Emblematic for her is a lipstick print of a kiss that Frida Kahlo mailed to a faraway lover with the inscription, “This is specially for the back of your neck,” transmitting a fleeting kiss that outlasts time

In similar bittersweet vein, her 2026 artist’s book, Last Night of the World, presents a boxed set of as-if postcards from which the owner might select one image to mail to the recipient of their desire on the last day of the world

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