Mercer Union | Sukaina Kubba

Publication

Sukaina Kubba

Turn Me Into a Flower

This soft cover book is published by Dundee Contemporary Arts on the occasion of Toronto-based artist Sukaina Kubba’s first major solo exhibition in a UK institution. Both the exhibition and publication – the first dedicated to Kubba’s practice – are titled Turn Me Into a Flower.

The artist’s work is strongly rooted in material and cultural research, storytelling, and drawing connections. Her multidisciplinary practice spans the mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking, fibres, audio, video and installation, and explores narratives of cultural and material assimilation and appropriation. For the exhibition, she created a new body of work in DCA Print Studio through a production residency in January 2024, including screenprint, paper pulp casting, embossing and laser etching.

This publication brings together texts commissioned by Mercer Union and DCA for our respective exhibitions with Kubba in 2024. For Kubba’s year-long SPACE commission, Jealousy, she created three consecutive new works for Mercer Union’s billboard platform, two of which were subsequently shown in her exhibition at DCA. With the support of the British Council Scotland, Creative Scotland and the Québec Government Office in London, DCA has brought together five texts commissioned by both galleries into a single space.

The publication includes a new poem by Glasgow-based poet and writer Daisy Lafarge, and an interview between Kubba and Montreal-based artist and curator Swapnaa Tamhane. These bookend three texts commissioned by Mercer Union to accompany Kubba’s billboard series, from Ami Xherro, Natascha Nanji and a second poem from Daisy Lafarge. It also contains a preface by DCA’s Head of Exhibitions, Tiffany Boyle, and full colour images of Kubba’s exhibition at DCA.

$23.00 CAD

Purchase

Edition: 500

Design: Valerie Norris

Dimensions: 21.6 x 16.4cm

Pages: 64pp

About the Writers

Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow, UK. Born in Hastings, she has lived in Scotland since 2011. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which won a Betty Trask Award and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. Lovebug, a short book on the poetics of infection, was published by Peninsula Press in 2023. Her reviews and essays on ecology, art and literature have been widely published, appearing in Granta, LitHub, The New York Times, Art Review, TANK Magazine, The White Review, and elsewhere.

Natascha Nanji is a writer and artist currently based in London. Via speculations and mythologies, her research plots future and past histories into the present day, often tracing migratory routes of people and objects.  She is co-editor & publisher of LAY IT ON THICK, a literary magazine about queer desire and erotics, and co-runs The Theatre Group. Most recently her work has been commissioned for the 14th Annual Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver (2022); Spike Island, Bristol (2022); and feminist press Sticky Fingers (2021).

Swapnaa Tamhane is a Toronto-born artist, curator and writer based in Montreal, Canada. Working to destabilise and untether colonial constructs, her process focuses on drawing and making paper. Her curatorial research considers contemporary art and design histories of India focusing on feminist histories. Tamhane has been a Research Fellow with renowned Canadian and international institutions, and she has been supported by granting bodies including Canada Council for the Arts, and Kunststiftung NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany), and Kulturstiftung des Bundes/International Museum Fellow. Her work has been exhibited at A Space Gallery, Toronto; Nature Morte, Delhi; articule, Montreal; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto; Surrey Art Gallery, British Columbia; and V&A Dundee.

Ami Xherro is a poet. Her work draws out the incomprehensible from the ordinary, playing with logics and feelings of association. She is the author of Drank, Recruited (Guernica Editions, 2023), which was longlisted for the Pat Lowther Award, and The Unfinished Flame (Swimmers Group, 2017). She has contributed writing to publications including The Brooklyn Review, Ugly Duckling Presse, The Capilano Review, The Ex-Puritan, and Metatron. She is a co-founder of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective (TETC) and co-edits Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation.