Flounder Lee

Flounder Lee is an artist/curator and postgraduate researcher in Art & Media at the University of Plymouth, UK pursing his PhD in art and curatorial practice. He grew up on a farm in the US where he learned many skills that he still uses. He was raised on the ancestral lands of the Yuchi, Shawnee, Muscogee/Creek, and Cherokee peoples. Many of these peoples were forcibly removed in the 1800s to make way for settlers such as his ancestors who were from Europe.

He received his BFA from the University of Florida and his MFA from California State University Long Beach—both in studio art and photography. His group exhibitions include: From Within in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ishara: Signs, Symbols, and Shared Languages at Concrete in Dubai; and Tashkent Biennale VIII in Uzbekistan. He’s had solo shows in Serbia, the US, China, and Cambodia.

Exhibitions curated include: The Future is…Ordinary? at the Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing, China; On this night, for the first time, something will happen… at the Jean Paul Najar Foundation, Dubai, and Aerospacial at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. He founded and co-ran SpaceCamp MicroGallery, a tiny project space in Indianapolis. He has written several essays including for Tribe: Photography and New Media in the Arab World.

Several overlapping themes run throughout his work: decolonialism, mapping, science, the future, and environmental change. He is media agnostic, using various media such as photo, video, performance, sound, and installation to create work that touches on these topics. Many of the same themes and media are also part of his curatorial practice, but it is broader than his art practice. His PhD project deals with a quotidian, decolonial future through both an artistic and curatorial perspective. He works using anti-oppressive practices—anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-heteronormative, inclusive, and intersectional with decolonial, resistance-based, and curatorial activism approaches.

Flounder Lee was the mentor for Jalal Bin Thaneya as part of the Critical Practice Programme 2019.