Jonathan Sullam was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels (1996-2000), studying Art in public spaces then graduated at the Slade School of fine arts College London his Master’s degree in Multimedia (2001-2003). After his education, the necessity to gather experience came with an art collective he co-founded, called Mobile Institute. He organised and produced with this collective site-specific artwork in collaboration with local institutions that had for objective a deep attachment to the spaces the artists encountered. Jonathan Sullam’s choice of locations were building sites, waste lands, river banks. In transition or devoid of function, they appeared abandoned for these reasons. Alighting in peripheral zones, he emphasized their complex and sometimes even contradictory characteristics, which only a real form of empathy with them permits recognition. The evocative power of these territories in mutation stemmed from sentiments they summoned, feelings that lie between poetry and nostalgia.

Through this predilection for space, Jonathan Sullam develops an empirical study of the human condition, its zenith and its programmed fall. He invokes emotions that are intimate but also collective, exploring their representation whilst restraining time in balance and widening space. This study is primarily psychological and one to which his works respond through an incessant to-ing and fro-ing between thought and material, up until the moment when tension in the movement freezes into the work of art. Jonathan Sullam uses industrial materials as a reference form upon which hand-crafted work is added or combined.His protean work is characterized by a poetic fusion of territory and the stories that have marked a given space. A coalescence into which he merges his own mythology and from which new fields of experimentation are born, these reflections explore the image, the material and the memory.

An object is first and foremost whatever you make of it, so it can, potentially, be perceived differently by different people. This is equally so for works of art, the perception of which can vary in function of their state, the site where they are exhibited and the moment when they are viewed. Fluorescent tubes are thus not merely sources of light: they produce a sound when switched on, they modify the space in which they are located and reveal (or not) images associated with them. The use of reflective surfaces, or even mirrors, can be part of a similar approach.

However, the use of an object is also a function of our knowledge about it, so that when, for instance, we are confronted with artefacts from the past, it is sometimes difficult for us to understand what they were used for. Jonathan Sullam makes metaphoric use of such time lags in his work to evoke tensions at work in our society. A microphone can thus relay messages of hate or peace, shapes produced by the automobile industry can reflect a prevailing state of mind at a moment of history and, one day, instruments associated with the exploitation of fossil fuels will no longer make any sense to humans when asked to describe what they are.

Creating a dialogue between the work of art and the spectator is another element that is central to Jonathan Sullam’s approach. The relationships established between his various projects create a descriptive framework for a narrative that offers different points of entry and comprehension, enabling the spectator to approach his work with a very broad perspective. So, a story featuring a powerful soundtrack offers numerous references to rock culture in its broadest sense – whether these are visual references (to the stage or the show), or links to song titles or the names of groups. The electricity that lights the fluorescent tubes of a work is the same source of power that drives amplifiers, electric guitars and microphones.