FIGHTING FORGETTING, WITH A VENICE BIENNALE WIN
British artist Sonia Boyce has been writing her own score since the 80s
Sonia Boyce is used to breaking down walls. Last month, she became the first black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest international art exhibition.
The work she presented in the British Pavilion won the top prize, the Golden Lion. Six years before, she had been the first black British woman to get elected to the country’s prestigious Royal Academy of Arts.
Yet, Boyce’s career path has been anything but a straight line. Past breakthroughs have been followed by years of oblivion, such as when she became the first black British woman to enter the collections of the Tate museum in 1987, then disappeared from the spotlight. She has made invisibility and cultural amnesia a focus of her art. Her Venice pavilion — an installation of sound, video and memorabilia — is all about the erasure of black British female singers of the past.
Even her Golden Lion fits in with her practice. It’s a reminder of the invisibility endured by generations of artists who weren’t white and male, and went unrecognised.
So, as she said in a recent interview, she greets the trophy with a mix of gratitude and circumspection.
“It seems almost ridiculous that it takes into the 21st century for a black British female artist to be invited to do Venice,” said Boyce, sitting in her sunlit south London studio. The studio bore traces of her winning installation: glitter, plywood, wallpaper and discounted vinyl records of black female singers.
“To be the first suggests that there wasn’t space for anyone like me before,” she said, adding that she hoped that her Venice victory wasn’t just “some kind of blip” and that “the door stays open for more to come through”.
Feeling Her Way, the work on view in Venice, is a tribute to forgotten British female singers of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage. A cacophony of sounds wafts through the pavilion as four female vocalists each sing, whistle, hum and wail on video screens.
The screens hang in rooms lined with tessellated wallpaper; arranged throughout the pavilion are gilded geometric objects based on the shape of pyrite, a mineral also known by the colonial-era term fool’s gold. In one gallery, black British vocalists of the past are remembered through a display of album covers (with marked-down price tags), cassettes and memorabilia.
“Different voices trying to negotiate the space in which they’re in,” said Boyce. “This is the essence of my practice.”
Boyce was born in London to parents of Caribbean descent and grew up in a household covered with patterned wallpaper and fabrics. Her father was a tailor, and her mother was a nurse and seamstress. As a girl, Boyce was fascinated by the wallpaper motifs, which seemed to come alive at night, she said.
She started studying art at 15 and went away to college near Birmingham, England. A visit to the 1981 exhibition “Black Art An’ Done” at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery was a revelation, she said, because she discovered that “there were these young black artists” making “very political work”.
Inspired by Frida Kahlo, she began picturing herself in rich oil pastels, wearing patterned dresses and gazing at the viewer. In one four-part piece — Lay Back, Keep Quiet And Think Of What Made Britain So Great (1986) — she drew her unsmiling self against the backdrop of Victorian-era wallpaper with emblems of empire and of Britain’s colonies.
Her pastels got her noticed and collected by the Tate and made her one of the pioneers of the black British art movement, which focused on race and cultural difference at a time of discrimination, rioting and police violence.
Yet, to Boyce, the self-portraits became a “cul-de-sac”, she said. She didn’t feel comfortable making work with herself at the centre, she said, and switched to representing “multiple identities: a social practice where I’m instigating the possibilities for other people to say who they are and what they do”.
To her contemporaries, that decision made sense.
“I am a huge fan of her early works,” said Isaac Julien, a black British filmmaker and installation artist, “but I also recognise that you want autonomy and a certain freedom.” Boyce “was a star very early on”, he added, “and her practice evolved in a way in which she followed her own sense of experimentation”.
The Venice Biennale was a game changer for Boyce long before her Golden Lion. She was invited in 2015 to show a performance work in the main Biennale exhibition, curated that year by Okwui Enwezor. It put her back on the art-world radar, and she was elected to the Royal Academy the following year.
In 2018, a survey of her work opened at the Manchester Art Gallery. Over the year leading up to the show, Boyce engaged museum staff in discussions about the collection, which includes John William Waterhouse’s 1896 painting of bathing nudes, Hylas And The Nymphs.
After female staff members spoke of being sexually harassed near the painting, of being compared to the nymphs and of being approached by male visitors, Boyce temporarily removed the Waterhouse in a performance and replaced it with texts she had recorded in the group discussions, such as, “This gallery presents the female body as either a ‘passive decorative form’ or a ‘femme fatale.’ Let’s challenge this Victorian fantasy!”.
Boyce’s attempt to involve more people in the curatorial process was also viewed as censorship of a beloved pre-Raphaelite painting and sparked national outrage. Writing in The Guardian, art critic Jonathan Jones said Boyce had made “a crass gesture that will end up on the wrong side of history”.
Looking back on the episode, Boyce said the uproar was because the performance involved “a 19th-century painting, ie, proper art, by a white male, recognised as a proper artist”.
Boyce herself is now enjoying similar recognition — and still getting used to it.
She recalled standing on the steps of the British Pavilion on the Biennale’s opening day and spotting women artists in the crowd who also deserved to have their work on display inside.
“You should be in here,” she remembered thinking to herself. “Why hasn’t that happened yet?” It was a moment of reckoning that she had postponed until then, she said. “I suddenly felt the weight of history.”