Susanne Clausen is an artist, educator and curator. Her work is often formatted as performance exhibition and includes video, performance, drawing, scenographic installation, recordings and text. She has published most of her work under the name Szuper Gallery, which is a collaborative practice with the artist Pavlo Kerestey, and she regularly collaborates with other artists, performers and audiences. In her works the performance and the exhibition become sites for post - or meta-production and installations often resonate theatrical film sets and stages, where the development of the work can be experienced. Performers and actors are choreographed within these sets, enacting movements and texts, thus generating a structure of poetic and political references.
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In March 2022, Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey set up Artists for Ukraine, a fundraising inititiave in support of artists at risk displaced people in Ukraine.
Susanne is a Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading. Since 2007 she has organised various education and teaching project bringing together international students to explore critical aspects and methods of global collaboration. This includes a co-operation with Nature Created by Design, a network of international universities, lead by Seoul Institute of the Arts, with Musashino Arts University Tokyo and Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts.
In 2017 she set up a small arts organisation within the university, Reading International, which became a liminal space between art school, regional arts community and an international contemporary art network. By inviting artists to respond to the specific social and historical framework offered by the art school and the town, the project explored how we can imagine the art school as a public arena, which opens its life beyond the academic community and actively engages with a wider public. Could it become a catalyst to create a speculative thinking space, erasing hierarchical (and economic) divisions between the educational environment and wider publics? Reading International aimed to create a space that is less separated from the professional public, where artists collaborate with students and the community to create a dynamic cultural space in a regional environment.
In 2011 she established the PhD Platform in Curating between the University of Reading and the Zurich University of the Arts Reading together with Dorothee Richter, who is now the platform’s director.
Szuper Gallery started in Munich as a platform to showcase collaborative exchanges between artists from Ukraine and Germany and quickly developed into a tool to explore presence and absence as artists, acting as a container that invades public space, and questions institutions and the role as artists within them. Szuper Gallery ‘performed’ a commercial gallery project and eventually tried to subvert its procedures. The gallery ran for several years.Throughout this time Szuper Gallery had to negotiate visas, travel, immigration status of their collaborators, uncertainty of funding.
Following this period Szuper Gallery worked and travelled between Kyiv, Munich and London. Eventually we were commissioned by Munich’s QUIVID programme to develop a large-scale public art project for the Munich Immigration Office, ‘Kreisverwaltungsreferat’ at Poccistrasse. The resulting Liftarchiv (2001- 2020), a mobile glass container, was situated in the entrance hall of the immigration office and served as a site for changing exhibitions and interventions. It housed the documentation of its own activities and the lift container could ride up and down like an elevator. It was an active performance and exhibition space in the immigration office between 2001-4 and featured collaborations with over 20 different artists, who helped to reflect on what immigration meant within the context of art.
Following this period Szuper Gallery worked and travelled between Kyiv, Munich and London. Eventually we were commissioned by Munich’s QUIVID programme to develop a large-scale public art project for the Munich Immigration Office, ‘Kreisverwaltungsreferat’ at Poccistrasse. The resulting Liftarchiv (2001- 2020), a mobile glass container, was situated in the entrance hall of the immigration office and served as a site for changing exhibitions and interventions. It housed the documentation of its own activities and the lift container could ride up and down like an elevator. It was an active performance and exhibition space in the immigration office between 2001-4 and featured collaborations with over 20 different artists, who helped to reflect on what immigration meant within the context of art.