The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami presents the South Florida premiere of “Pictures of Susan,” a feature documentary about rising New Zealand-based artist Susan Te Kahurangi King. With the enduring support of her family, King creates expressive, boldly undulating works of color and line that frequently coalesce into appropriated cartoon-like characters, predating Pop art. The film examines the artist’s upbringing and earliest works, her twenty-year dormant period, and the recent resurgence in interest from the art world for her idiosyncratic drawings since resuming in 2008.

At the age of four, Susan Te Kahurangi King (b. 1951, Te Aroha, New Zealand) ceased speaking and began to draw prolifically. She continued to draw well into her thirties, until she abruptly stopped. After a twenty year lapse in drawing, she resumed in 2008, picking up where she had left off. Over the last eight years, King has generated a remarkable output of intense and enigmatic drawings that stretch space and volume in unorthodox ways.

Part of Idea 006: Defiant Subjectivities

In a world in which experiences are continuously quantified and plotted as information, in which projection models and risk assessments guide our behavior, in which PR and polls drive our politics, there are individuals who function unencumbered by the ubiquitous condition of data. They carve out unlikely and often defiant practices in a world that feels increasingly flattened into numbers and trend reports. Laura Lima, Renaud Jerez, Susan Te Kahurangi King, and Ida Applebroog, each with unique agendas and strategies, make a case for the continued significance of subjectivities that find in defiance a constitutive trait.