Sonja Lau, Foto: Christina Dimitriadis

Sonja Lau

Sonja Lau works as a freelance curator, writer and lecturer with a focus on the relationship between art, power and history, mechanisms of art history production and curating as a performative and artistic practice. After her MA (Chelsea College of Art and Design, London), she was a Fellow of the Alfred Toepfer F.V.S. and the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Tirana, Albania, 2008-10 and 2011-13), Curatorial Fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, and is a member of the ICI – Independent Curators International, New York.

Past exhibitions and projects include Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Zusammenhang Gesamtkunstwerk, 2015), Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden (Der Zaudernde Körper, 2013), National Theatre Tirana (Fiend. The 21 Seconds piece, with Armando Lulaj and John Tilbury); Opera Village Africa (Von der Kunst, die Waffen gegen sich selbst zu wenden, with Friedrich von Borries, Clémentine Deliss, and Ariane Müller, 2020); in addition to interventions and actions such as Try… Again… Better. Cornelius Cardew in Tirana, 2012, Tirana Historical Museum; Repaintings, together with André Siegers, 2008, National Gallery Tirana. Her reviews and essays have been published in, among others, Texte zu Kunst, Cabinet Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, or in the catalogue 10 Jahre Operndorf Afrika (Spector Books, 2021).

Currently, Lau is researching and working on the evaluation of femininity in contemporary jurisprudence (re: von der poesie im recht, 2021, Studio Bethanien, with Nika Dubrovsky, Dominique Hurth, Silvia Federici, et al.), and is the author of the taz blog Die Pflicht zum weiblichen Ungehorsam, which deals with the legal evaluation of female perpetration. She is currently preparing an exhibition on this topic at Kunstraum Kreuzberg (November 2022), as well as a publication project that will have its start at the Tarabya Cultural Academy.

Sonja Lau was a resident at the Tarabya Cultural Academy from April to July 2022.