About

Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker and author. His craft and mission go beyond and deeper than the question of identity. Following the idea of the rhizome, Souklaye digs in the sensitivity and history laying in the interiority of broken bodies, environmental urgencies and political retribution.

Souklaye started his artistic journey focusing on DIY social justice, or vandalism as he called it, and defined it as the necessary destruction for justice and self-designation. Lyon, his hometown, carries the Canut revolts heritage and merges with his Neg marron origin from Martinique (freedom and rebellion movement), to obtain a perfect cocktail, a cocktail molotov.

Souklaye then began to write action poetry and interwove it with protean political and visual happenings —sometimes extreme, often borderline, his messages traveled from guts to guts across all corners of France, Switzerland and Belgium. But it is during his durational live radio show at the renowned French independent radio station RCT that he started to craft what would become his uniquely lyrical and gut-wrenching live experiences.

This inner quest took other forms with his writings — le jour du fleau which explores the duality of the night and Solus which cuts deep into grief — and his obsession with noise and its sonic linguistics. The noise from and inside the city shaped his approach to granular synthesis. Those raw words and intense sounds created the condition for his live experiences and installations.

Interiority is at the center of Souklaye's body of work; collective intimacy and epigenetic dialogues are the inner spaces where he spends time exploring and inviting the audience (in)to. Each living soul is a part of his live experiences, and there are no active or passive members of the audience, only those who want to be activated. His shows are self-centered yet collective live experiences that reveal what is left inside him and us.

Among his most notable pieces are live performances Depopulated presented at Judson Church (New York, USA), the Momentary (Arkansas, USA), UNDERMY-YOUR-OURSKIN performed at ChaShaMa Gala (New York, USA), Grace Exhibition Space (New York, USA) and the Ancien Musée de Bruxelles-Nord (Brussels, Belgium), the video performance Black Breathing screened at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz gallery (Berlin, Germany), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (Gyeonggi-do, Korea), at the 9th Days of Contemporary Art (DOCA) International Festival (Moscow, Russia), and sonic installations Liquid Soul presented at Helsinki Central Library Oodi (Finland) and Soliloquy in motion shortlisted for the 26th Phonurgia Nova Awards (Prix Art Sonore & SACEM) and aired at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris, France), and elected at the Contemporary Music Festival, Ars Electronica Forum Wallis 2021 (Leuk, Switzerland).

Souklaye was recognized in the top 100 Contemporary Artists from the Aesthetica Art Prize, and his essay Living Liveness was published in Art As Social Practice: Technologies for Change by editors Xtine Burrough and Judy Walgren (Routledge, 2022). Souklaye is the producer and co-host of Conversations From the Center, a series of global conversations about the arts, transdisciplinary research, and social justice activism for the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (Boston, USA & Helsinki, Finland).

Souklaye is a commissioned artist for the 2022- 2024 Program of International Contemporary Ensemble & the Jerome Foundation (New York, USA), and the recipient of the Prospect Art grant with the installation Be Happy or Die (Los Angeles, USA).

Portfolio:

2019
Live performance:

Data Sampling / Ghost Suffering at Spill Yer Tea Live Art and Performance Art festival curated by GRIP at Constellations, Liverpool, UK
UNDERYOURSKINS [untold.unfold.unprecedend] at IGNITION Live Art Explorations curated by Hector Canonge, Grace Exhibition Space, New York, USA
Arm wrestling for two please, Laterna Magica Museum for Visual Knowledge, Kulturnatten, Copenhagen, Denmark
terrainGLISSANT, Map(s) of the Moving World, Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Helsinki, Finland
Migrant Market, the State-less Mind Performance Art Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark
3 stages policy of poetry, Sorte Firkant, Copenhagen, Denmark
Data Sampling / Ghost Suffering, Officine Forte Marghera, Venice, Italy

Digital performance / video art:

A.I reviews something… the domestic cat at the press refresh pavilion, The Wrong Biennale
A.I reviews something, XXXIX Festival del Caribe Cuba, Santiago, Cuba
A.I reviews something, II Muestra de Video Arte Faenza, Fondation Gilberto Alzate Avendaño, Bogotá, Colombia

Sound installations:

My little chaos programmed at “Les raons de la por” Flexus project concert, Cinema La Unió Social de Flix, Flix, Spain
Sleeping Beast, Night Gardening II: Frequencies and Fragrances, Berlin, Germany
Épilogue, épitaphe, et puis rien…, International Electronic Language Festival (FILE), São Paulo, Brazil

Video performance:

Migrant Market, Performance is Alive, Satellite Art Show NYC, New York, USA
#TME (TAILOR-MADE, MODULAR AND EXPENDABLE) (video performance) SerformanceP 3, 3rd Mostra de Performance, São Paulo, Brazil
#TME (TAILOR-MADE, MODULAR AND EXPENDABLE), ITINERANT Festival, Grace Exhibition Space & Smack Mellon, New York, USA

Residency, workshop, lecture, performance:

Archipelago: Map(s) of the Moving World, Center for Arts, Design and Social Research, Helsinki, Finland
Digital State of Mind and physical body of work, the State-less Mind Performance Art Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark

2018
Live performance:

THE SECRET, Sorte Firkant, Copenhagen, Denmark
EPISTOLARY MOTHER TONGUE, Sorte Firkant, Copenhagen, Denmark

Video installation: Selling Dreams, Design Museum, London, UK.
Digital and literary performance: Haiku D’Etat, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Digital performance: A.I. reviews something, digital, worldwide.
Digital art: Primal lights / Digital Shrapnel, diptych of digital art series, digital, worldwide.

2017
Video installation

Selling Dreams, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, South Korea
Selling Dreams (video installation), Moscou Documentary Film Center, Moscow, Russia
Selling Dreams (video installation), CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark

Sound art:

Morlock & Gentlemen
TIME/LOVE

Live performance: #TME (performance), Copenhagen Jazz Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark

Digital art: Shapes of collapse / State of lines / Data, pleins et déliés, trilogy of digital art series.

2011-2016
Chatbot literature/ digital installation: LOST, Facebook Messenger.
Video installation: Selling Dreams, Architecture triennal Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Digital exhibition and performative installation: le déserteur, iOS.
Literature:

Nano Stories (English, French)
SOLUS, novel (French)
I’ll the bucket with last one punchline / Mr Pousse-Mousse / Lament of an outcast, short novel trilogy (English)
Le jour du fléau, novel (French)

Performance/ sound art:

Le Desassembleur de Puzzle, Institut Français, Köln, Germany
Sur ton visage, Paris, France
Entropy of duality, Paris, France

2000-2010
Paris, France: 24 heures d’écriture (performance).
Paris, France: DATAPOLIS (performance, sound art).
Paris, France: Nouveaux Classiques with Benjamin Paulin (performance), Universal.
Paris, France: Dis-moi ce que tu entends (interview performance), France Culture, Radio France.
Paris, France: Ils finissent leur nuit… (interview performance), France Culture, Radio France.
Paris, France: Silent Poetry (video installation), l’observatoire des sociétés mourantes.
Paris, France: La certitude du doute (literature performance).
Lyon, France: Rythmes & Mécanismes (radio performance), RCT.
France, Switzerland: La Section Lyonnaise des Amasseurs de Mots (performance), les Subsistances, le Chat noir.
Lyon, France: La blackline (radio performance), RCT.
Saint Etienne, France: Le poisson rouge.
France, Switzerland: Mes démons enracinés vers le ciel (performance), CCO, L’art scène.
Grenoble, France: R09-Fin de Cycle (performance, sound art), Sp-2.

1990-2000
Lyon, France: Coeff8 et Sujet d’élite (collective performance).
Lyon, France: Vandalism (performance).