Lou Lou Sainsbury (b. 1994; London) is an artist based in Rotterdam, working across moving image, live-performance, poetry, drawing, sculpture and textiles. A self-described time traveler, Sainsbury’s work seeks to tell stories exploring histories of resistance, transformation and entanglement within both human and more-than-human worlds. With collaboration at the core of her practice, rituals and invocations, collective study, domestic intervention, adaptation, songwriting and make-shift mutations make up some of her idiosyncratic research methods.
Utilising a wide material vernacular, Sainsbury's projects draw from a poetics of resonance and sensuality, excavating a historical and imagined past of transfeminized and queer life within the brokenness of human and more-than-human worlds. Guided by embodiment, cinema and the sonic, her projects often scenographically take form as permeable, performative and leaking installations; narratively evoking passages of life and death, erotics, resurrection, possession and the diaristic.
Making connections between spirituality, medicalisation, colonialism and technology, Sainsbury's tricksterish work defies categorisation, reorienting itself towards modes of sensing that trouble hierarchies of the visual. Rooted in friendships and everyday life, haunted and heartfelt, or humorous and uncompromising, her genre-bending projects seek to challenge the hegemonic forms of knowledge, temporality and identification that condition us. Sainsbury received her MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute in 2021 and her BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton in 2016. Previously she was an associate artist at Open School East in 2017. She is currently an associate artist of Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon.
Her previous solo exhibitions include A Cloud That Bites, Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles (2024); DESCENDING NOTES, Roodkapje, Rotterdam (2023); Earth is a Deadname, Gasworks, London & Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2022); and my hole is the place where i call myself a mother, Well Projects, Margate (2020). She has presented in group exhibitions internationally at major institutions and film festivals including Chapter (Cardiff), Rencontres Internationales (Paris & Berlin), International Film Festival Rotterdam, Tate Modern (London), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Nottingham Contemporary and Yaby (Madrid). Sainsbury has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Mondriaan Fonds (2023) and Freelands Gasworks Partnership Programme (2021- 2023). Her writing has been featured in journals and publications including Arcadia Missa, zweikommasieben, Almanac and SALT Editorial.