About the exhibition

Between the Door and the Street is the first solo exhibition in Scotland by the highly esteemed American artist Suzanne Lacy.

Developing out of six months of conversations between Lacy, 400 women and a few men from activist groups in New York City, Between the Door and the Street culminated in a one-day performative public action that took place on 64 stoops in a Brooklyn neighbourhood. Witnessed by over 2500 people who entered the closed-off street, the performance audience became a ‘listening voyeur’ to unscripted conversations among groups of women, identified by yellow pashmina scarves, seated on the steps and porches of individual homes. Choreographed by activist inspired and group generated questions on gender, race, ethnicity and class, the conversations weaved together multiple intergenerational narratives that grappled with the politics of immigration, labour, poverty, all of which have significant impacts on women’s lives.

Visit:
28 February – 12 April
Monday – Saturday, 12–5pm

Read more on our exhibition page.

Speakers' Biographies

Pinar Aksu is a PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow, a theatre maker and Human Rights and Advocacy Coordinator. Her research explores ‘Art and Law in migration: using art practices for social change and access to Justice’. She is interested in finding connections between solidarity, art, justice, and the law.  Within her role, Pinar is involved with campaigns and projects supporting people seeking asylum and refuge, educational projects and human rights. Pinar is also involved in using theatre and creative methods to create social change.   

Amanda Catto is a freelance producer and cultural strategist who lives and works in Edinburgh.  She has an extensive overview of the arts policy and funding landscape in Scotland having been Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland (2010-2023) and its predecessor body, the Scottish Arts Council (2000-2009).  With a strong international outlook Amanda was responsible for the establishment and successful delivery of the Scotland + Venice project from 2003 to 2022. Core interests include the development of funding and support systems for individual artists; the evolution of artist-run and artist-led initiatives in Scotland; the effective embedding of equalities, diversity and inclusion in organisational policies and practice; the development of new models for artist-led commissioning in the public realm.  Amanda is currently co-Chair of Collective, a contemporary art space situated on Calton Hill in Edinburgh.

Ruth Ewan is an artist based in Glasgow. Her wide-ranging practice includes installation, writing, creating environments, events and objects. In contrast to this varied approach to form she creates deeply focused works which emerge from immersed research and collaboration, often drawing on conversations with others. These build on Ewan’s long-term interests in creativity as a tool for social and environmental justice and alternative systems of knowledge. For twenty years, our relationships with plants and animals have been a regular focus of her work, offering layered roots into specific histories inviting us to think critically about the construction of narratives and our perception of standard time. 

She has shown extensively in galleries and museums including The National Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, CAPC Bordeux, The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, São Paulo Biennial, Camden Arts Centre, and Tate Britain. In 2021, she was the first commissioned artist to present a solo exhibition for Cooper Gallery’s Ignorant Art School programme, Sit-in #1: We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted to Be and It’s Not Too Late to Change.

Much of her work has been commissioned and developed for public space, working on projects in London with Art on the Underground, Artangel, Chisenhale and Frieze Projects East. In 2019 she developed Silent Agitator, a huge clock based on a cartoon from the IWW union for High Line, New York. In relation to this work a live performance event There’s a Better Life and You Think About It Don’t You? was created with local choirs. Her sculpture Believe in Discontent was shortlisted for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth commission in 2024. She is currently developing a permanent multi-sited project for the space around Korsvägen Station in Gothenburg, Sweden and an urban forest and arboreal calendar for the city of Stuttgart, Germany.

Her work is in the collection of Tate London, McManus Galleries Dundee, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, FRAC Champagne Ardenne, The Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh University and CAAC Seville. 
 

Rumilla Uddin grew up and lives in Wester Hailes (Edinburgh), and is a parent who worked for many years as a nursery worker. In CWC she is a member and activity leader. Running activities such as henna, games, story sharing and meditations based on Islamic beliefs. She uses storytelling, humour, jokes and games to bring people together. She is 99.9% optimistic, can spin a coin by throwing it, and keeps her goals simple and achievable whilst moving through every day, and is full of quotes that will help you stay positive.

The Community Wellbeing Collective (CWC) is a socially engaged art collective of 30+ people living in and connected to Wester Hailes. It is a diverse, intergenerational, intercultural, working-class community-led and run organisation - imagining, practising and creating space for collective wellbeing towards change.

CWC was originally initiated by social practice artists Jeanne van Heeswijk and Bobby Sayers through a commission by Edinburgh Art Festival (2021) in partnership with WHALE Arts. Bringing people together to discover shared urgencies and grow skills, forming a group where people can be themselves, use their talents, sparking personal, community and structural transformation. Resulting in the creation of the Community Wellbeing Space in the dis-used off-licence in The Westside Centre as part of Edinburgh Art Festival (2022).

Their space in Wester Hailes, run by and for the people, offers over 350+ free activities and welcomes over 7000+ visitors per year, including 12 major monthly ‘Anchor Events’ where they collaborate closely with artists and relevant organisations around political urgencies that are barriers to better wellbeing and act towards local change such as housing, racism, social care, addiction, cost of living crisis and others issues.

Their space continues as a living art-work brought to life each time a human comes to rest, connect and play within it, suspending suffocations, creating space to breathe and the possibility to dream together.

Holly Knox Yeoman is a visual art community development specialist based in Edinburgh. Between 2020 and 2023 she was the Community Engagement Manager at Edinburgh Art Festival, focused on building relationships in Wester Hailes, nurturing community co-production commissions and events. 2022 commissions included: Pester and Rossi’s Finding Buoyancy and Setting Sail - a canal boat performance with Rhubaba Choir and members from the Wester Hailes community; and the Community Wellbeing Collective and Space, initiated by social practice artists Jeanne van Heeswijk and Bobby Sayers, which has continued to evolve, and is a registered charity. Holly remains an advisory friend to the Community Wellbeing Collective and is also a trustee of Artlink. Between 2021-2022 Holly was a Community Creative Fellow, a partnership between Derby Museums and National Art Strategies (USA), supported by Arts Council England and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch), to explore new tools and frameworks around driving physical and social transformations through arts and culture. Since June 2023, she has been the Community Development Coordinator for National Galleries of Scotland’s The Art Works. Holly studied Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practice at DJCAD (2011) and gained a Masters of Letters in Curatorial Practice in Contemporary Art from Glasgow School of Art (2017).

Access

Cooper Gallery is located to the right side of the DJCAD buildings on Perth Road. The entrance is via double doors which face onto a car park.

The gallery is on two floors. Ground floor has ramped access. First floor is accessible by an internal lift and six steps with a handrail. Wheelchair access is via a stairclimber. Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access.

First floor is also accessible via 24 steps. Two flights of 12 steps with handrails are separated by a landing.

• The event is on the First Floor with stepped or lift access + stairclimber for 6 steps
• The discussion will be live-captioned on a TV screen
• Exhibition videos are subtitled and captioned in English
• Seating is provided and/or additional seating available, please ask an invigilator
  
  For all enquiries please email: [email protected]

Access Funds

Scottish Contemporary Art Network are able to offer a small number of travel bursaries available to individual SCAN members across Scotland to attend this event and will also consider offering travel support to others involved with artist-led/voluntary organisations (up to 5).  

To apply
Please email [email protected] with a note of your travel costs and circumstances by Friday 28 March. 
In line with SCAN's net zero commitments, bursaries will only be issued for travel by public transport unless travel by car is required for access reasons, e.g. disability.
 

Toilets

The ground floor has a wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral.

Interpretation

Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides. If you require alternative formats for material in exhibitions please email or ask our Guides.
 

Image 

Suzanne Lacy, Between the Door and the Street, 2013 (Production still)
Courtesy Suzanne Lacy

Funding support

The exhibition is supported by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with funding from the DoJ Centenary Trust, Creative Scotland and Scottish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN). 

Speakers' Biographies

Suzanne Lacy is renowned as a pioneer in socially engaged and public performance art. Her installations, videos, and performances deal with sexual violence, rural and urban poverty, incarceration, labour and aging. Lacy’s large-scale projects span the globe, including England, Colombia, Ecuador, Spain, Ireland and the U.S.  

In 2019 she had a career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at Yerba Buena Art Center. Her work has been reviewed in major periodicals and books and she exhibits in museums across the world. Also known for her writing, Lacy edited Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art and authored Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007. She is a professor at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California and a resident artist at 18th Street Arts Centre.  

www.suzannelacy.com
 

Sophia Yadong Hao is a curator, writer and editor. Working internationally, Hao characterises the curatorial as a rhizomatic praxis capable of transforming exhibition making into a testing ground for radical futures. 

Hao is currently Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, Reader in Curatorial Practice at the University of Dundee, and Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. Hao’s practice situates exhibition making as a critical inquiry, Feminist ethos as curatorial method, and alternative art pedagogies as a radical praxis of decolonised knowledge production.

Hao’s publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event?, Hubs and Fictions, A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE, and NOTES on a return. She is founding editor of the digital publication What I am Reading Now….

About the exhibition

Between the Door and the Street is the first solo exhibition in Scotland by the highly esteemed American artist Suzanne Lacy.

Developing out of six months of conversations between Lacy, 400 women and a few men from activist groups in New York City, Between the Door and the Street culminated in a one-day performative public action that took place on 64 stoops in a Brooklyn neighbourhood. Witnessed by over 2500 people who entered the closed-off street, the performance audience became a ‘listening voyeur’ to unscripted conversations among groups of women, identified by yellow pashmina scarves, seated on the steps and porches of individual homes. Choreographed by activist inspired and group generated questions on gender, race, ethnicity and class, the conversations weaved together multiple intergenerational narratives that grappled with the politics of immigration, labour, poverty, all of which have significant impacts on women’s lives.

Visit:
28 February – 12 April
Monday – Saturday, 12–5pm

Read more on our exhibition page.

Access

The event will be live captions on Zoom.
All enquiries please contact: [email protected] 

Image 

Suzanne Lacy, Between the Door and the Street, 2013 (Production still)
Courtesy Suzanne Lacy

Funding support

The exhibition is supported by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with funding from the DoJ Centenary Trust and Creative Scotland