Presented across all public spaces of Rivington Place, Sonia Boyce's Scat centres on the sign... more Presented across all public spaces of Rivington Place, Sonia Boyce's Scat centres on the significance of sound in art and explores how we experience sound, both collectively and intimately. Two immersive video works are brought together for the first time along with the Devotional Collection, Boyce's archive of CDs cassettes, vinyl records and other ephemera. For you, only you (2007), in collaboration with Mikhail Karikis and early music consort Alamire, transforms a 16th century musical masterpiece into a contemporary vocal composition. Oh Adelaide (2010), a collaborative work by Sonia Boyce and Ain Bailey, incorporates found footage of jazz singer and entertainer, Adelaide Hall (1901-1993), and mixes her voice with digitised and condensed recordings from the Devotional Collection. Scat is presented by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). For you, only you was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Loc...
The exhibition presents collaborative work, arising from a two-week experimental residency betwee... more The exhibition presents collaborative work, arising from a two-week experimental residency between artist Sonia Boyce and post-graduate students and researchers across Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art.
‘For you, only you’ is a multi-media performance that Sonia Boyce conceived and organized as a co... more ‘For you, only you’ is a multi-media performance that Sonia Boyce conceived and organized as a collaboration with Greek singer and composer Mikhail Karikis. The installation/performance was part of a series of three exhibitions 'Triple Echo', of new audio-visual works (by Sonia Boyce, Sophy Rickett, Terry Smith) in three separate gallery installations. My installation takes the form of a three screen, audio-visual work based on ‘documentation’ of a previous live performance held in the Chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford. My conception for this work brought together the sacred choral work 'Tu solus qui facis mirabila (You alone can do wonders)' by Josquin Desprez (1440-1521) with the contemporary voice of Mikhail Karikis together with the early music choral group Almire. My objective with this project was to explore and transgress the boundary between Renaissance devotional music and the context of the 21st century bringing together distinct styles and forms into a new unity. This continues my artistic and research concern with devotional forms and contemporary music that has underpinned much of my recent work. The initial collaboration was supported through an invited collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, as well as a partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea; Locus+, Newcastle upon Tyne; Milton Keynes Gallery; and The Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo; and with the support of Arts Council England.
En el marco de la Muestra Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo iAfuera! Arte en Espacios Publicos ... more En el marco de la Muestra Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo iAfuera! Arte en Espacios Publicos que el Centro Cultural Espana Cordoba organiza para el mes de octubre la artista inlgesa Sonia Boyce, que se encuentra realizando una residencias en Ciudad de las Artes, realizara el lunes 4 a las 13.30 hs. en el Museo de la Memoria la obra Gather junto al coro de Arquitectura, dirigido por Gustavo Maldino, quienes cantaran la cancion Oracion a la Justicia de Maria Elena Walsh. Este proyecto es uno de los pertenecientes a la seccion Residencias del iAfuera! y que tiene por objetivo que los artistas invitados articulen un proyecto investigativo y de participacion con comunidades de Cordoba.
Alles Maskerade! Fasching, Karneval & Mummenschanz im Spiegel der Kunst. Everything Masquerade! C... more Alles Maskerade! Fasching, Karneval & Mummenschanz im Spiegel der Kunst. Everything Masquerade! Carnival, Carnival and masquerade in the mirror of art. November 22, 2014 - February 22, 2015
Éditée par le Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, sous la direction de Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok et ... more Éditée par le Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, sous la direction de Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok et Sophie Orlando, cette publication marque l’aboutissement d’un programme de recherche international porté par l’University of the Arts London. Proposant une relecture du conceptualisme et de sa supposée résistance aux politiques de l’identité, ce livre détaille les manières dont des artistes conceptuel.le.s se sont emparé.e.s, en Europe, de considérations migratoires, de genre, de classe, de sexe ou de race, après les bouleversements politiques et sociaux de 1968. D’approche intersectionnelle, cette réflexion s’articule autour de quatre focus, respectivement consacrés au travail de Nil Yalter, Stanley Brouwn, David Medalla et Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc.
The Devotional Wallpaper (2008 onwards) is the third artist wallpaper Boyce has made. The artwork... more The Devotional Wallpaper (2008 onwards) is the third artist wallpaper Boyce has made. The artwork consists of a roll-call of 200 names of black British women in the music industry that is made into a simple geometric grid pattern, with one entire repeat measuring 5 metres across by 2 metres high. The Devotional Wallpaper is one of a series of works in ‘The Devotional Series’ which began in 1999 as a six-month project, as part of the FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) Collaborations Programme that partners artists with specific community groups in Liverpool to co-produce an artwork. Boyce was partnered with Liverpool Black Sisters. During the sessions, the group was tasked with building a map of black British female singers. Since then, word of mouth has spread as members of the general public have added their favourites towards a list that now contains over two hundred names. The concept of The Devotional Wallpaper came about as a result of a drawn installation of a roll-call of one hundred and eighty names of black women musicians Boyce made at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007. Boyce wanted to develop the National Gallery installation ‘total experience’ as a portable work, which would afford new kinds of experience and spectatorship. To arrive at a wallpaper design, Boyce enlisted the help of artist and bespoke wallpaper designer Linda Florence to provide her with some workshops on developing a repeat surface pattern. Out of these workshops Boyce was able to solve the problem of how to use text as both information (a sign) as well as the basis for a series of drawings (to play with its semiotic) as Boyce drew concentric lines around each letter of the performers’ names.
New and Recent Works was a solo show of sound pieces and drawings. Works in the exhibition took a... more New and Recent Works was a solo show of sound pieces and drawings. Works in the exhibition took as a starting point a number of the black female pop-stars I had been collating. The exhibition included works on paper and diamante collages, stencils, drawings, and paintings, and were accompanied by reproduced images of the stars or their record covers. Assembled together they appear like a wall of precious teenage fan club images. A large scale mixed media installation, Foreign 2004 added sound collated from songs recorded over each other. The piece is a celebration of the voices everyone knows consciously or subconsciously. Thereby it defines music as part of our language codes. Within this exhibition I also explore the inclusion of backing singers who rarely receive a mention, which I understood as a critique of the invisibility of much female talent. Though significantly different, this exhibition linked the aesthetic of my earlier work with materials like hair to my research and art practice derived from the interest in popular music and black female singers. My research, involving collaboration with other artists as an integral part of my practice, was aided by a NESTA Fellowship ‘Questioning the role of the artist and audience’ granted in March of 2004.
A series of exhibitions held at Spike Island, Bristol, Bluecoat, Liverpool, and The Potteries Mus... more A series of exhibitions held at Spike Island, Bristol, Bluecoat, Liverpool, and The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, in 2009 - 2010, Like Love in its widest sense explores universal ideas around the concept of care and community cohesion – the emotion we invest in others and in the making of works of art. Taking as its inspiration Roland Barthes’, A Lover’s Discourse, Boyce uses the combination of labour intensive and utilitarian processes to underscore the testimony, adamant posturing, ambivalence, longing and sometimes-tenuous nature of relationships. Like Love is commissioned by Spike Island and is an Arts Council England National Touring Exhibition in partnership with the Bluecoat and The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.
The Future Is Social Symposium addressed recent debates about the politics, aesthetics and qualit... more The Future Is Social Symposium addressed recent debates about the politics, aesthetics and quality of contemporary art made through collaboration and participation. Interrogating the core conditions of socially-engaged arts practice this symposium addressed the dynamics of social sculpture, authorship, the gift economy and the nature and status of the document. Speakers included Paul Goodwin, Zoe Shearman, Viv Reiss and David Cross. This event concluded the two-week experimental residency between artist Sonia Boyce and post-graduate students across Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art (University of the Arts London) and also featured films and performances made during this residency.
Conceived of as a "sequel" to "Space Invaders", the exhibition investigates t... more Conceived of as a "sequel" to "Space Invaders", the exhibition investigates the relationship between art and popular culture. Work by nine international artists is brought together with two essays, extensive interviews and artist's statements to develop various concepts of the self in Western thought and cultural production.
The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing'... more The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing', the 1972 BBC television mini-series and adapted book with a special issue edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and Susan Pui San Lok. Berger's book, now part of the Penguin on Design series which includes Sontag’s 'On Photography' and McLuhan’s 'The Medium is the Message', has been a monumental influence on the fields of art history, cultural studies, design, visual communication, and, of course, visual culture studies. With an editorial by Guins, the issue includes contributions from Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Lisa Cartwright, Jill Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer Gonzalez, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Marita Sturken. It features an interview by Juliette Kristensen with the programmes’ and book’s producers Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis, as well as a photo essay by Susan pui san Lok, that draws on Dibb’s personal archive to highlight the televisual project’s collaborative production and material traces. As the Journal’s Events editor, Lok also commissioned five photo-essays that take up some of the book’s enduring themes: Julian Stallabrass continues the circuitous critique of looking, desiring, and selling, into the realm of subvertising; Sonia Boyce plays on the relay and duplication of eyes and lenses, rotating around and with their at least doubled subjects; Ming Wong shifts centres and perspectives, transposing the intermingled dreams of advertising and movie industries from 1950s Hollywood to 1950s Singapore, and so-called West to East; John Timberlake alludes to the politics and disavowal of climate change, hinting at pollutant incursions upon an urban picturesque; while Broomberg and Chanarin, in the face of saturated, mediatised and televised violence and death, implicate the viewer in ways of seeing and the politics of looking, then and now.
This book, co-authored with Ian Baucom and edited by David A Bailey, is the outcome of a lengthy ... more This book, co-authored with Ian Baucom and edited by David A Bailey, is the outcome of a lengthy period of research into the last twenty years of Black Art in Britain. It focuses particularly on the Thatcher period and the explosion of the Black Arts Movement in the wake of civil unrest and rioting in a number of British cities. The book is extensively illustrated bringing together a dialogue between leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics including Stanley Abe Jawad, Adelaide Bannerman, Allan deSouza, Kobena Mercer, Yong Soon Min and Judith Wilson. Combining cultural theory with anecdote and experience, it examines how the black British artists of the 1980s should be viewed historically and explores the political, cultural, and artistic developments that sparked the movement. It reviews practice in the context of public funding, and the trans-national art market and its legacy for today's artists and activists. The volume includes a unique catalogue of images, a comprehensive bibliography, and a series of descriptive timelines situating the movement in relation to relevant artworks, films, exhibitions, cultural criticism, and political events from 1960 to 2000. The book has become an established point of reference for the study of Black Art and cultural developments of Braitain during the period. In March 2007 it was awarded the INIVA Historians of British Art Book Prize.
Sonia Boyce was one of the artists featured in this exhibition. In 1994 Sonia Boyce designed her ... more Sonia Boyce was one of the artists featured in this exhibition. In 1994 Sonia Boyce designed her first wallpaper, Clapping, for Wish You Were Here, an installation of domestic-style spaces created by the artists’ group BANK. It was shown in an orange and white colourway. For the Walls are Talking exhibition, Clapping uses a black and white hand print, evoking a feeling of claustrophobia and predatory menace. Another Boyce wallpaper, Lovers Rock was inspired by popular music and explores our physical interaction with the spaces we live in. The paper is white; the only decorations are the words at about hip-height that have been blind embossed, from Susan Cadogan’s hit ‘Hurt so Good’ (1975). At parties, when this song was played, couples would rub and sway up against the walls, responding to the intense sensual message of the music. The Lover’s Rock wallpaper would be rubbed and marked at hip height, evoking and to commemorates this tactile encounter between bodies and walls. Music is also the subject of Boyce’s recent Devotional Wallpaper (2008), which was created as part of some reminiscence sessions where a group of women (with Boyce herself) pooled their memories of black British musicians and singers. Boyce has represented these reminiscences in various ways, including an etching for the Rivington Place portfolio (2007), by inscribing the names on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery (2007), and now as silk-screened wallpaper, where 200 names are listed, each framed by radiating concentric lines. This roll-call of fame is also a memorial, a list of luminaries of the kind found in town halls, schools and sports clubs where the names of prizewinners are recorded in chronological sequence.
Presented across all public spaces of Rivington Place, Sonia Boyce's Scat centres on the sign... more Presented across all public spaces of Rivington Place, Sonia Boyce's Scat centres on the significance of sound in art and explores how we experience sound, both collectively and intimately. Two immersive video works are brought together for the first time along with the Devotional Collection, Boyce's archive of CDs cassettes, vinyl records and other ephemera. For you, only you (2007), in collaboration with Mikhail Karikis and early music consort Alamire, transforms a 16th century musical masterpiece into a contemporary vocal composition. Oh Adelaide (2010), a collaborative work by Sonia Boyce and Ain Bailey, incorporates found footage of jazz singer and entertainer, Adelaide Hall (1901-1993), and mixes her voice with digitised and condensed recordings from the Devotional Collection. Scat is presented by Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). For you, only you was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art in partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Loc...
The exhibition presents collaborative work, arising from a two-week experimental residency betwee... more The exhibition presents collaborative work, arising from a two-week experimental residency between artist Sonia Boyce and post-graduate students and researchers across Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art.
‘For you, only you’ is a multi-media performance that Sonia Boyce conceived and organized as a co... more ‘For you, only you’ is a multi-media performance that Sonia Boyce conceived and organized as a collaboration with Greek singer and composer Mikhail Karikis. The installation/performance was part of a series of three exhibitions 'Triple Echo', of new audio-visual works (by Sonia Boyce, Sophy Rickett, Terry Smith) in three separate gallery installations. My installation takes the form of a three screen, audio-visual work based on ‘documentation’ of a previous live performance held in the Chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford. My conception for this work brought together the sacred choral work 'Tu solus qui facis mirabila (You alone can do wonders)' by Josquin Desprez (1440-1521) with the contemporary voice of Mikhail Karikis together with the early music choral group Almire. My objective with this project was to explore and transgress the boundary between Renaissance devotional music and the context of the 21st century bringing together distinct styles and forms into a new unity. This continues my artistic and research concern with devotional forms and contemporary music that has underpinned much of my recent work. The initial collaboration was supported through an invited collaboration with The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, as well as a partnership with the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea; Locus+, Newcastle upon Tyne; Milton Keynes Gallery; and The Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo; and with the support of Arts Council England.
En el marco de la Muestra Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo iAfuera! Arte en Espacios Publicos ... more En el marco de la Muestra Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo iAfuera! Arte en Espacios Publicos que el Centro Cultural Espana Cordoba organiza para el mes de octubre la artista inlgesa Sonia Boyce, que se encuentra realizando una residencias en Ciudad de las Artes, realizara el lunes 4 a las 13.30 hs. en el Museo de la Memoria la obra Gather junto al coro de Arquitectura, dirigido por Gustavo Maldino, quienes cantaran la cancion Oracion a la Justicia de Maria Elena Walsh. Este proyecto es uno de los pertenecientes a la seccion Residencias del iAfuera! y que tiene por objetivo que los artistas invitados articulen un proyecto investigativo y de participacion con comunidades de Cordoba.
Alles Maskerade! Fasching, Karneval & Mummenschanz im Spiegel der Kunst. Everything Masquerade! C... more Alles Maskerade! Fasching, Karneval & Mummenschanz im Spiegel der Kunst. Everything Masquerade! Carnival, Carnival and masquerade in the mirror of art. November 22, 2014 - February 22, 2015
Éditée par le Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, sous la direction de Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok et ... more Éditée par le Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, sous la direction de Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok et Sophie Orlando, cette publication marque l’aboutissement d’un programme de recherche international porté par l’University of the Arts London. Proposant une relecture du conceptualisme et de sa supposée résistance aux politiques de l’identité, ce livre détaille les manières dont des artistes conceptuel.le.s se sont emparé.e.s, en Europe, de considérations migratoires, de genre, de classe, de sexe ou de race, après les bouleversements politiques et sociaux de 1968. D’approche intersectionnelle, cette réflexion s’articule autour de quatre focus, respectivement consacrés au travail de Nil Yalter, Stanley Brouwn, David Medalla et Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc.
The Devotional Wallpaper (2008 onwards) is the third artist wallpaper Boyce has made. The artwork... more The Devotional Wallpaper (2008 onwards) is the third artist wallpaper Boyce has made. The artwork consists of a roll-call of 200 names of black British women in the music industry that is made into a simple geometric grid pattern, with one entire repeat measuring 5 metres across by 2 metres high. The Devotional Wallpaper is one of a series of works in ‘The Devotional Series’ which began in 1999 as a six-month project, as part of the FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) Collaborations Programme that partners artists with specific community groups in Liverpool to co-produce an artwork. Boyce was partnered with Liverpool Black Sisters. During the sessions, the group was tasked with building a map of black British female singers. Since then, word of mouth has spread as members of the general public have added their favourites towards a list that now contains over two hundred names. The concept of The Devotional Wallpaper came about as a result of a drawn installation of a roll-call of one hundred and eighty names of black women musicians Boyce made at the National Portrait Gallery in 2007. Boyce wanted to develop the National Gallery installation ‘total experience’ as a portable work, which would afford new kinds of experience and spectatorship. To arrive at a wallpaper design, Boyce enlisted the help of artist and bespoke wallpaper designer Linda Florence to provide her with some workshops on developing a repeat surface pattern. Out of these workshops Boyce was able to solve the problem of how to use text as both information (a sign) as well as the basis for a series of drawings (to play with its semiotic) as Boyce drew concentric lines around each letter of the performers’ names.
New and Recent Works was a solo show of sound pieces and drawings. Works in the exhibition took a... more New and Recent Works was a solo show of sound pieces and drawings. Works in the exhibition took as a starting point a number of the black female pop-stars I had been collating. The exhibition included works on paper and diamante collages, stencils, drawings, and paintings, and were accompanied by reproduced images of the stars or their record covers. Assembled together they appear like a wall of precious teenage fan club images. A large scale mixed media installation, Foreign 2004 added sound collated from songs recorded over each other. The piece is a celebration of the voices everyone knows consciously or subconsciously. Thereby it defines music as part of our language codes. Within this exhibition I also explore the inclusion of backing singers who rarely receive a mention, which I understood as a critique of the invisibility of much female talent. Though significantly different, this exhibition linked the aesthetic of my earlier work with materials like hair to my research and art practice derived from the interest in popular music and black female singers. My research, involving collaboration with other artists as an integral part of my practice, was aided by a NESTA Fellowship ‘Questioning the role of the artist and audience’ granted in March of 2004.
A series of exhibitions held at Spike Island, Bristol, Bluecoat, Liverpool, and The Potteries Mus... more A series of exhibitions held at Spike Island, Bristol, Bluecoat, Liverpool, and The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, in 2009 - 2010, Like Love in its widest sense explores universal ideas around the concept of care and community cohesion – the emotion we invest in others and in the making of works of art. Taking as its inspiration Roland Barthes’, A Lover’s Discourse, Boyce uses the combination of labour intensive and utilitarian processes to underscore the testimony, adamant posturing, ambivalence, longing and sometimes-tenuous nature of relationships. Like Love is commissioned by Spike Island and is an Arts Council England National Touring Exhibition in partnership with the Bluecoat and The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.
The Future Is Social Symposium addressed recent debates about the politics, aesthetics and qualit... more The Future Is Social Symposium addressed recent debates about the politics, aesthetics and quality of contemporary art made through collaboration and participation. Interrogating the core conditions of socially-engaged arts practice this symposium addressed the dynamics of social sculpture, authorship, the gift economy and the nature and status of the document. Speakers included Paul Goodwin, Zoe Shearman, Viv Reiss and David Cross. This event concluded the two-week experimental residency between artist Sonia Boyce and post-graduate students across Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art (University of the Arts London) and also featured films and performances made during this residency.
Conceived of as a "sequel" to "Space Invaders", the exhibition investigates t... more Conceived of as a "sequel" to "Space Invaders", the exhibition investigates the relationship between art and popular culture. Work by nine international artists is brought together with two essays, extensive interviews and artist's statements to develop various concepts of the self in Western thought and cultural production.
The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing'... more The Journal of Visual Culture marks the 40th anniversary of John Berger’s 'Ways of Seeing', the 1972 BBC television mini-series and adapted book with a special issue edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and Susan Pui San Lok. Berger's book, now part of the Penguin on Design series which includes Sontag’s 'On Photography' and McLuhan’s 'The Medium is the Message', has been a monumental influence on the fields of art history, cultural studies, design, visual communication, and, of course, visual culture studies. With an editorial by Guins, the issue includes contributions from Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Lisa Cartwright, Jill Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer Gonzalez, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Marita Sturken. It features an interview by Juliette Kristensen with the programmes’ and book’s producers Mike Dibb and Richard Hollis, as well as a photo essay by Susan pui san Lok, that draws on Dibb’s personal archive to highlight the televisual project’s collaborative production and material traces. As the Journal’s Events editor, Lok also commissioned five photo-essays that take up some of the book’s enduring themes: Julian Stallabrass continues the circuitous critique of looking, desiring, and selling, into the realm of subvertising; Sonia Boyce plays on the relay and duplication of eyes and lenses, rotating around and with their at least doubled subjects; Ming Wong shifts centres and perspectives, transposing the intermingled dreams of advertising and movie industries from 1950s Hollywood to 1950s Singapore, and so-called West to East; John Timberlake alludes to the politics and disavowal of climate change, hinting at pollutant incursions upon an urban picturesque; while Broomberg and Chanarin, in the face of saturated, mediatised and televised violence and death, implicate the viewer in ways of seeing and the politics of looking, then and now.
This book, co-authored with Ian Baucom and edited by David A Bailey, is the outcome of a lengthy ... more This book, co-authored with Ian Baucom and edited by David A Bailey, is the outcome of a lengthy period of research into the last twenty years of Black Art in Britain. It focuses particularly on the Thatcher period and the explosion of the Black Arts Movement in the wake of civil unrest and rioting in a number of British cities. The book is extensively illustrated bringing together a dialogue between leading artists, curators, art historians, and critics including Stanley Abe Jawad, Adelaide Bannerman, Allan deSouza, Kobena Mercer, Yong Soon Min and Judith Wilson. Combining cultural theory with anecdote and experience, it examines how the black British artists of the 1980s should be viewed historically and explores the political, cultural, and artistic developments that sparked the movement. It reviews practice in the context of public funding, and the trans-national art market and its legacy for today's artists and activists. The volume includes a unique catalogue of images, a comprehensive bibliography, and a series of descriptive timelines situating the movement in relation to relevant artworks, films, exhibitions, cultural criticism, and political events from 1960 to 2000. The book has become an established point of reference for the study of Black Art and cultural developments of Braitain during the period. In March 2007 it was awarded the INIVA Historians of British Art Book Prize.
Sonia Boyce was one of the artists featured in this exhibition. In 1994 Sonia Boyce designed her ... more Sonia Boyce was one of the artists featured in this exhibition. In 1994 Sonia Boyce designed her first wallpaper, Clapping, for Wish You Were Here, an installation of domestic-style spaces created by the artists’ group BANK. It was shown in an orange and white colourway. For the Walls are Talking exhibition, Clapping uses a black and white hand print, evoking a feeling of claustrophobia and predatory menace. Another Boyce wallpaper, Lovers Rock was inspired by popular music and explores our physical interaction with the spaces we live in. The paper is white; the only decorations are the words at about hip-height that have been blind embossed, from Susan Cadogan’s hit ‘Hurt so Good’ (1975). At parties, when this song was played, couples would rub and sway up against the walls, responding to the intense sensual message of the music. The Lover’s Rock wallpaper would be rubbed and marked at hip height, evoking and to commemorates this tactile encounter between bodies and walls. Music is also the subject of Boyce’s recent Devotional Wallpaper (2008), which was created as part of some reminiscence sessions where a group of women (with Boyce herself) pooled their memories of black British musicians and singers. Boyce has represented these reminiscences in various ways, including an etching for the Rivington Place portfolio (2007), by inscribing the names on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery (2007), and now as silk-screened wallpaper, where 200 names are listed, each framed by radiating concentric lines. This roll-call of fame is also a memorial, a list of luminaries of the kind found in town halls, schools and sports clubs where the names of prizewinners are recorded in chronological sequence.
Conceptualism: Intersectional Readings, International Framings. Situating "Black Artists & Modernism" in Europe, 2019
EDITORS Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando
TEXTS Nick Aikens, Juan Albarrán, Lotte... more EDITORS Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando
TEXTS Nick Aikens, Juan Albarrán, Lotte Arndt, Eva Bentcheva, Sonia Boyce, Jennifer Burris, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Laura Castagnini, Alice Correia, Sandra Delacourt, David Dibosa, Fabienne Dumont, Iris Dressler, E. C. Feiss, Annie Fletcher, Alexandra Kokoli, Charl Landvreugd, Elisabeth Lebovici, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes,
susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando, Sumesh Sharma, Sarah Wilson, Wei Yu
This e-book offers the findings of the conference ‘Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating “Black Artists & Modernism” in Europe After 1968’ at the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 7–9 December 2017, presented by Black Artists & Modernism in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum.
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Papers by Sonia Boyce
TEXTS Nick Aikens, Juan Albarrán, Lotte Arndt, Eva Bentcheva, Sonia Boyce, Jennifer Burris, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Laura Castagnini, Alice Correia, Sandra Delacourt, David Dibosa, Fabienne Dumont, Iris Dressler, E. C. Feiss, Annie Fletcher, Alexandra Kokoli, Charl Landvreugd, Elisabeth Lebovici, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes,
susan pui san lok, Sophie Orlando, Sumesh Sharma, Sarah Wilson, Wei Yu
This e-book offers the findings of the conference ‘Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating “Black Artists & Modernism” in Europe After 1968’ at the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 7–9 December 2017, presented by Black Artists & Modernism in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum.
ISBN 9789490757199