- 16 May 2025
- 1:00 – 2:30 pm
- Paul Mellon Centre and Online
What is Research Now? presents a full year of programming around interconnected strands that ask us to think more curiously, critically and open-endedly about the role and practice of the arts.
The theme is led by the question: Can research in the arts enable us to live and better inhabit the world together?
It will bring artists, curators, writers, scholars and thinkers from a range of different backgrounds to think together through lectures, performances, conversations, and hands-on workshops at the Paul Mellon Centre in London.
In May, events will explore interconnected strands:
'Ongoing Colonial Worlds' asking what research is under conditions of occupation and unrest
'On Looking' show us that how we look changes how we understand the world around us
Join us over lunch for "A Bridge, a Seesaw, a Möbius Strip: On the Making of an Autoethnographic Film" with Solveig Qu Suess.
When Solveig began shooting a documentary recounting her mother’s career as an optical engineer, telling the story was complicated by a non-disclosure agreement her mother had signed with the Chinese state in 1987. Constructing a personal narrative had to navigate a promise of confidentiality to a powerful actor. With the lack of accounts and records as a premise, the work traces around this absence.
This talk explores perception shaped by silences, voids and impossible narratives embedded within archives. Presented through excerpts from Little Grass, it centres on a series of exchanges – of lenses as much as inherited histories and political constraints – featuring characters that shapeshift across multiple identities in time and space.
Through archival Kodachrome slides from corporate and family collections, Little Grass moves between China in the 1980s and 90s and Solveig’s mother’s early years in Switzerland. Both intimate and staged, these photographs create a palpable tension between memory and its images, belonging and statecraft, lenscrafting and transposition.
Image credit: Still from Little Grass, (2023). Family Archives. Solveig Qu Suess.
About the speaker
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Solveig Qu Suess is an artist and researcher working in documentary film and artistic research. She is currently an artist in residence and a visiting assistant professor at NYU Shanghai, as well as a PhD candidate in urban studies at the University of Basel. Her research operates at the intersections of visual ethnography, environmental humanities and feminist science and technology studies.
She is currently working on two films: Little Grass, which explores the history of geopolitical division between China and the West through the lens of her mother's career as an optical engineer; and Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains, developed as part of her PhD research, which investigates the downstream politics of hydroelectric dam construction on the Mekong River, where the river becomes a device for examining a series of infrastructural transformations between China and Southeast Asia. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-authored Geocinema, a project which probed into ways of understanding and sensing the earth while being on the ground, enmeshed within vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and festivals, including at the Li Xianting Film Fund, Beijing; Kunsthall Trondheim; Fondazione Prada, Venice; International Film Festival Rotterdam; ArtScience Museum, Singapore; and Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. Her writing has been published by Duke University Press and she has contributed articles to e-flux Architecture, Lausan, The Funambulist and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Related events
16 May 2025
What is Research Now? Day 3, Part 2
Festival
Paul Mellon Centre