Isabelle Sully

To describe Isabelle Sully’s work, the title of German art historian Benjamin Buchloh’s influential essay on conceptual art, ‘From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’ (1989), could provide boilerplate copy. Across art-making, curating, editing, and writing, Sully uses the mechanisms and materiality of administration to tease out questions of gender, labour, value, and (artistic) production. In her work evaluation forms, audit reports, risk assessments, and policy documents become scripts and schemas. Utilising language and theatrical devices, such as the monologue, stand-in, and cameo, Sully animates these instruments of administration through narrative and performance, infiltrating their standardisation with subjectivity, as text becomes speech.

Sully’s interest in administration mirrors the socio-economic turn of the past half-century, with the ascendancy of late capitalism, growth of bureaucracies, and new forms of work. Amongst this, the position of women and their labour is a red thread underscoring all of Sully’s practice, with a particular interest in the shift from the more artisanal work of the 19th-century bookkeeper (dominated by men), to the routinised, mechanised, and fragmented work of the 20th-century administrator (dominated by women). In her work this can be seen in the creation of the fictional character Isabelle Kubíková (a compound of Sully’s first and her mother’s maiden name) to invert the historical denial of female ownership in name and possessions by building up a body of assets across each iteration of the project; or casting philosopher Heleen Schröder to deliver a fictional art history lecture on the forms of ‘work’ that are noticed and registered as valuable within the art school.

For The National 4, Sully has created a new audio work, The Lives Already Given To Work (2023), which comprises a series of news bulletins written by Sully, voiced by the well-known Australian newsreader and journalist Sandra Sully, and distributed through the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s public announcement system operated by front-of-house staff. While Sandra Sully reads the bulletins in a formal and objective tone, the script breaks with the expected news events and information items, veering into the candidly personal. In this, the casting of Sandra Sully is pointed. As the first person in Australia to report on the unfolding events of September 11, 2001, Sandra Sully later noted the raw emotion that overcame her on air as she witnessed the events live, shattering the expectation of the unfeeling newsreader. In Sully’s work, she creates a similar crack in the guise of the newsreader as something infrastructural – like the administrator – and without subjectivity.

The familial mythology of Sully’s relation to Sandra Sully also informs her casting, drawing on the collectivising structure of a name alongside the developmental stages of this work, which were informed by research into communication networks and media histories of women’s movements in Australia, including the Women’s Electoral Lobby, which acted as a mouthpiece for women’s issues. In The Lives Already Given To Work, Sully draws a direct line between the newsreader, microphone, and audio speaker, to literally represent the act of a woman using her voice. Across this work and Sully’s practice, she uses such strategies to playfully reclaim the ‘voice,’ in the narratological sense of the term, of the feeling bodies often abstracted by the structures and systems within which they work.