As part of the Contemporary Art Talks series, Sonia Boyce gave a talk at Sotheby’s Institute of Art about her exhibition Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. This show was conceived to coincide with the exhibition of Lygia Clark The I and the You, showing at the Whitechapel Gallery concurrently. At Sotheby’s Institute, Boyce was also in conversation with Gilane Tawadros, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery.
Sonia Boyce is an artist and educator who came to prominence in the 1980s as a key figure in the emerging Black-British artists movement. Since the 1990s, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a wider social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, Boyce’s art practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference.
Boyce began her talk by explaining, ‘Negotiating with strangers and the unfamiliar is key to my practice.’ Since the 1990s, she has often engaged people—often artists and performers, and sometimes guests and audience members—in unscripted situations. A performance residency in Mexico, where she plaited her hair together with that of artist Richard Handcock, highlighted complex questions of race and gender. This experience inspired her to create a similar situation in her work Exquisite Tension (2006), whose video was included in her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Responding to Gilane Tawadros’s highlighting of the significance of “stranger-intimacy” in her work, Boyce stressed that she has often worked with people she does not know well. This, she noted, reflects the society we live in and how we negotiate our differences. During the Lygia Clark exhibition, powerful moments occurred when people were invited to activate works.
For instance, one of Clark’s works is based on suits stitched together, requiring people wearing the suits to negotiate moving together. These situations could make participants feel self-aware, whether they experienced pleasure or awkwardness. Tawadros recalled the unease some visitors felt at Boyce's exhibition, particularly in response to her work Do You Want to Touch? Hair Objects (1993–onwards), a sculpture that allowed visitors to touch hair. She observed, ‘Some people were really quite put off by it and found it very difficult. In fact, somebody later said that we should have had a trigger warning!’
When asked about her use of archive, Boyce explained that it should not be viewed as an inert record, and that it needs to be activated. It was important to her to realize that she did not feel compelled to have a reverent attitude towards archival material. Referring to her video Oh Adelaide (2010), which incorporated found footage, including images of black minstrels she did not like, she asserted that the archive could be transformed. She maintained, ‘We have to approach the archive with a certain skepticism.’
Written by Pierre Saurisse, Senior Lecturer, MA Contemporary Art, Sotheby's Institute of Art