Jamilah Sabur
Jamilah Sabur is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice is a poetic excavation of history, memory, and language. Her work decodes the “eternal syntax” of the planet, treating foundational realms such as the deep-sea floor and the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) colonial archive as ineffable scripts—archival texts that hold the transmuted story of our collective existence.
Sabur often cites her experience as a Research Coordinator at the Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine in Miami (2014) as a foundational influence. By coordinating complex biological sampling, cognitive assessments and physiological testing for a nationwide longitudinal study on ME/CFS and Gulf War Illness, she grounded her practice in meta-ethnographic techniques. Inspired by this radical expansion of clinical boundaries, Sabur utilised her exposure to these rigorous, multi-dimensional methodologies to synthesise a poetic and recursive approach to history and the body. Engaging with this pioneering shift in medical validation allowed her to bridge the gap between hard data and lived experience.
Founder of the experimental magazine The Artefact Echo, Sabur’s recent group exhibitions include Fruits of Labour at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium; Aan de rand van de Hemel: Visioenen at Museum Krona, Uden, Netherlands; Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, California. Her solo presentations include The Harvesters at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; and La montagne fredonne sous l’océan / The mountain sings underwater at Fondation PHI, Montréal. Sabur’s practice extends into public lectures, including a collaboration with linguistic anthropologist Dr George Aaron Broadwell at The Rollins Museum of Art on ‘Timucua Language and Embodied Landscape’, which interrogated the relationship between the indigenous linguistics of the extinct Timucua tribe, the Habsburg empire in the Americas, and how the body’s relationship to the environment shapes language. Her work is held in permanent collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB), the central bank of the Netherlands. Sabur lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.