The Brooklyn Rail

Sonia Boyce presented Feeling Her Way for the British Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early eighties as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the nineties Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement and sound.

On the occasion of an interconnected pair of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery—one for which Boyce co-curated the work of Lygia Clark, and the other of which presents Boyce’s work—the artist joined Mark Hudson on the Rail’s New Social Environment (Episode #1023) to discuss her deep appreciation for Lygia Clark, the role of performance in her own work, and the importance of engaging with one’s audience.

Mark Hudson (Rail): It’s particularly exciting to be having this conversation in the context of these two amazing exhibitions that are happening at the Whitechapel Gallery, which are unique in the sense that both explore issues of participation, interaction, improvisation in art, and they are also interactive and participatory with each other. The first is the great Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark, pioneer of modernism in Brazil, who started out in a Constructivist vein strongly influenced by Europe. She went on to create interactive works which the viewer is invited to manipulate, before developing a participatory therapeutic practice while seeking refuge from the Brazilian military dictatorship in Paris in the late sixties. The second is Sonia Boyce, who not only is a great admirer of Lygia Clark, but also co-curated the exhibition. So these two exhibitions are in a kind of symbiosis or synchronicity. They’re happening on different floors of the same gallery, yet they’re interacting. Sonia, how did this come about?

Sonia Boyce: This exhibition came about because of a long-standing conversation I’ve been having with Gilane Tawadros, an art historian and curator and now Director of the Whitechapel Gallery. Back in the late nineties, Gilane was writing a monograph on my work. I had been making a series of what could be called “hair objects,” small sculptures made out of both human hair and synthetic hair bought from Afro hair shops. Gilane had come to see an exhibition of that work, and when we started having conversations about the book, she said the hair objects reminded her of the work of Lygia Clark, as both were artworks which people were allowed to touch and directly engage with. I didn’t know who Lygia Clark was at that point. The first time I saw Lygia’s work was at the Whitechapel. There was a show that had been curated by Catherine de Zegher, Inside the Visible, which looked at the feminine within art. There was a very low plinth on the upper ground gallery with lots of Lygia’s objects. That was my first direct encounter with them. So this new exhibition feels a little bit like a full circle, from that show in 1996 to this one in 2024.

Rail: The title of the exhibition of Lygia’s work is The I and the You, which is one of the best titles I’ve ever come across. It comes from an artwork Lygia made where two participants are connected in these suits and then proceed to explore each other through the many pockets, which are full of different textures. I think the notion of “the I and the you” immediately brings up the idea of interaction between artist and viewer. For example, we’ve had perhaps five hundred years of ‘I’ art, which is all about me, the artist. Maybe it’s time for more art that’s about ‘you’, the other person. What does it bring up for you?

Boyce: There’s many things that I think about. I particularly love where she’s involving self and other as part of the artwork. But I’m reminded of art historian and critic Claire Bishop, who’s drawn attention to what she thinks are the discrepancies between the desire for art to connect us and what she characterizes as its kind of finite capacity. Lygia was making these works in the sixties, but somewhere along the line a certain distrust in the idea of something that’s interactive crept in. However, I do still think there’s a desire for the idea that art can connect, not only connect us to ourselves, but be connected to other people. Art has the capacity to make us feel and “be with” rather than simply “look at.”

Rail: During the pandemic there was the notion that we were all heading for a more caring society. Care was talked about as a new, big phenomenon in art. We were all going to be meaningfully interacting with each other, and that would seem to make Lygia Clark suddenly ahead of her time and very relevant. She actually did practice art therapy. She created mass participation artworks that those taking part were often profoundly affected by. Do you think we’re retreating from that ideal that came in during the pandemic? Or is that still important?

Boyce: Personally, I think it’s more important than it ever has been. The ability to not just see another as “the other.” And, of course, art has much to say about this. What Lygia was doing in the sixties was really pioneering. But she wasn’t the only person that was looking at these questions of bringing people into the production of art, and the conversations of art. At the moment care seems to be a hot topic, but all of these questions were there before COVID. I’m kind of an optimistic pessimist in thinking that these questions live with us, and they get amplified at particular moments. That’s why I think there is a lot of interest in this show. It’s about how art might bring us into the same room. Whether one calls that care is another issue, but at least it brings us into the same room to think about those things.

Rail: That’s really lovely. Now to strike a vaguely cynical note, I often encounter artists who are obsessed with the idea of bringing the viewer in: what is the viewer thinking? But when you talk to these artists, they’re not interested in real, actual viewers. They have a kind of notional, hypothetical viewer in mind. So to see someone interacting with real people, rather than this kind of Duchampian theoretical fourth presence—I think it’s quite a thing.

Boyce: At a certain point Lygia decided to stop calling what she was doing art, partly because the language for it wasn’t very developed. I think the language around what this kind of practice might be is still in an embryonic state. Of course, all artists want people to be engaged with what they’re doing. That’s the very purpose of it. That’s the very nature of art; it’s there to be engaged with. I think the cynicism that challenges this work is a kind of unrequited desire on the part of those who are viewing and have a sense that something is not being fulfilled. But I don’t know what I can do about that, or what any artist can do about that. What does it mean? What does one want of their audience? It’s really difficult to be prescriptive about an audience, because they’ll be coming from various perspectives. Some may feel that they are being cajoled into interacting with art, whereas others can’t get enough. I suppose what I’m saying is, simply, there’s not one viewer.

Rail: That’s absolutely true. So one moves from Lygia’s exhibition, with that wonderful title, The I and the You, which seems to encompass so much, seems to evoke so many utopian, heartwarming possibilities, into your show, which is called An Awkward Relation. It sounds like a very interesting riposte to Lygia’s exhibition. What did you mean by the idea of an awkward relation?

Boyce: I’ve been making works engaging with other people since the early nineties. What started the conversation with Gilane Tawadros—this is before I knew Lygia’s work—was this group of curious sculptures I made with afro hair stuffed into stockings. That work was called Do You Want to Touch? (1993).

I was making those works very intuitively. I didn’t quite know what they were, but I realized they were inviting a kind of physical engagement. I was so worried by them that I asked one of my students whether they would come and talk to me in my studio about them. The student’s first response when they saw there were quite a lot of them, about fifty, was that it was a bit like a scalping spree. There’s something disturbing about these hair objects that have no body.

It seemed to make sense to make a display of them and invite people to touch them. One of the things that was recalling was my experience of being a Black person and having a stranger coming up and wanting to touch my hair. This was a common experience, actually, amongst Black people that I knew. What’s that about? It’s about the Black body being regarded in terms of public ownership. Solange Knowles made a song back in 2016 called, “Don't Touch My Hair,” which I bring up to show that this is a common experience for Black people.

There’s that side of the work, but then I was also thinking about Black women’s relationship to their hair. In recent years, there’s been a lot of discussion about the way Black women, particularly during slavery, were using their hair as a tool for freedom. They would plait in their hair the escape route to get out of the plantation, and everybody who knew what was going on could read the code. So there’s a sense of the Black body being victimized in a way, but on the other side, there’s this understanding of the inventive ways in which us Black people have used our hair. For me, the works operate on both of those levels.

Rail: In some of the titles you give them, like Three Legs of Tights Stuffed with Afro Hair (1994), I get the impression you enjoyed the kind of slight absurdity of it. It’s almost comedic.

Boyce: Yes. Even though the subject matter of the work may be very serious, I’m committed to the idea that there should be pleasure at the same time. There should be something that is endearing in some way. There’s a project that I did a few years afterwards, called The Audition (1997), where I invited people to come to an art center to be photographed wearing an afro. I ended up taking nine hundred photographs that day. So many people came. And one of the things I understood about the afro as a sign of the Black body, is that it had entered that realm of parody. That it was sort of understood as a comedic trope, you could say—one that is attached to the history of minstrelsy and the Black body being depreciated. But then you’ve also got the way in which, during the Black Power movement, the afro became a sign of power. So it swings between these different registers of parody and power. When I was working with people wearing these afros they would laugh, but not know why they were laughing.

Rail: Throughout the exhibition there is wallpaper, very boldly patterned. I understand that wallpaper has been a feature in your life in a number of ways.

Boyce: I’ve been working with wallpaper since I was a student back in the Jurassic age of the eighties. For me it signals so many different things. My parents’ home was multi-patterned and multi-layered in terms of surfaces and repeat-patterns being everywhere. I know there’s probably many people who will have experienced this same thing: I would imagine, particularly at night, that the wallpaper was moving and that there was something else going on within the repeat-pattern. It became this liminal space.

The source image of Braided Wallpaper (2023) comes from a wig I bought online. You can now buy complete wigs that are braided throughout. I bought a braided wig and I photographed it, and then I mirrored it and repeated it. There’s a really interesting research group at Norwich University of the Arts whose research theme is around chaos and pattern, which I relate to the elements that can make up wallpaper. I think particularly of someone like William Morris, who brings the wild into the house through his designs. He makes the wild seem tame and livable, and I think that’s what repeat patterns can do.

Rail: I want to talk about the photograph of the white guy’s ear. It’s on the wall and in contrast to another photograph of dreadlocks. When I walked into the gallery, I thought, “Okay, picture of a white guy’s ear with some stubble, not quite sure why that’s there.” And then this afternoon, when I was looking through the slides, I read the title and I suddenly hit on a very different interpretation. Can you tell us why it’s there Sonia, what the title means, and what those two images are about for you?

Boyce: This was part of a series of hair works I was doing in the mid-nineties. The two photographic images—one landscape, one portrait—are called Head I and Head II (both 1995), and they sit together. Head I in brackets, says “skin,” and Head II, in brackets, says “dread.” I was born and grew up in London. In the seventies, if you said the word “skin” your mind immediately went to the term “skinhead.” The skinhead would be someone who’s on the far right, who quite proudly presents their racist views about Black people. So that hairstyle was very coded in the UK at a particular moment. And so, yes, the photograph seems surreal in this setting, because the ear feels prominent, but anybody who has had to run from a group of skinheads will know exactly what that hairstyle, that image, makes reference to. And then over a period of time it kind of changed and was adopted by hipsters.

Rail: When I saw the title “skin” I had quite a strong reaction, because it immediately brought me back to an experience I had with skinheads. I was violently assaulted during that whole Anti-Nazi League period, and it was profoundly traumatizing.

Boyce: I was very keen, not only for this work to be in the show, but also Exquisite Tension (2006), where I worked with Richard Hancock and Adelaide Bannerman. Richard is a performance artist, and Adelaide at that point was mainly curating performance works, and I asked them if I could film and photograph them with me plaiting them together.

This particular work came out of a residency based on performance art where I was partnered with Richard. We were asked to look at who we were partnered with and to think about what was the same and what was different. Now, Richard is tall and he’s white and male. I’m short and I’m Black and female. And I kind of thought, okay—and then I realized that I had long hair and he had long hair. So I plaited my hair into his hair, and we walked around for a while. It was very interesting, but very strange. Of course, I couldn’t see what we looked like. So when I got back to the UK, I asked Adelaide whether she would step into my place so I could film it. Exquisite Tension is a four minute video that I made of me plaiting them together.

They only met about ten minutes before I started to film and plait them together, and they look really miserable because they don’t know each other. They were plaited together for the whole day, and slowly they got to know each other. Much later I asked them to respond to what was going on for them during that moment. Richard’s response was that he felt he was going to be overly racialized, and overly gendered, and put within the frame of being heterosexual. He felt that Adelaide’s racial and gendered identity framed his, and that idea of the relation between them became a kind of burden of representation.

Rail: His face seems to have become the poster image for your exhibition with the title An Awkward Relation, and he looks beautifully awkward in those photographs. So I was surprised to find that this work is titled Exquisite Tension, not An Awkward Relation. What did you mean by the exquisiteness of it?

Boyce: So, I remember when I plaited myself to him during the residency in Mexico that I was stretching up so that it wasn’t too painful for him, and he was bending down so it wasn’t too painful for me. And being entangled in that way, we had to try and figure out ways to accommodate each other, with the knowledge that if we didn’t it could be quite painful. For me, that tension was something. I thought that there was something really exquisite in the possibility of the pain that we were trying to avoid.

Rail: Let’s talk about the climactic work of your exhibition, We move in her way (2017), which—I don’t know how to describe it. Is it a re-creation? It’s a seven-channel video work. Are these seven simultaneous views of one performance?

Boyce: There are seven films that play simultaneously and they all last fourteen minutes. Each one is a different perspective of the performance I made at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. When I was invited to make a work at the ICA, I wanted to collaborate with an experimental vocalist named Elaine Mitchener and a sculptor and choreographer named Barbara Gamper. Barbara decided to bring on board three dancers: Eve Stainton, Ria Uttridge, and Be van Vark. The aim was to try and find a way to involve the audience. It was an invited audience of about fifty people, and to try to make it easier for them to take part, I made a series of masks based on a work by Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Sophie Taeuber-Arp was one of the founders of Dada and performed often at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The mask was a key element that the audience could wear. You could literally say they could hide behind these masks. And the aim was for the dancers to encourage the audience to get involved with sculptures that Barbara had provided. I should add that this particular work was me trying to think about some of the experiments that Lygia Clark was doing when she was working with art students at the Sorbonne in the late sixties.

At first, of course, the audience was very reticent about joining in. People weren’t given any instructions. They were sitting or standing often in the dark, and the performers would go towards them and try to encourage them to come and join in their movements. I wasn’t directing anything, so there was no set of instructions to the dancers. There was a crew to film and photograph the performance, but I didn’t look through any cameras and I didn’t give the crew any instructions either. They were allowed to film what they wanted to film.

It was meant to go on for about half an hour, but the audience slowly became more involved and eventually they started to take over. They were playing with these materials and playing with each other and playing with the dancers, so much so that it went on for two hours, which was great. At a certain point, Elaine thought, “Well, I’m done.” So she left, and then the dancers thought, “Well, actually, we’re done too.” And they left. And then the crew packed up and the audience kept on playing.

Rail: Wow. Okay.

Boyce: The first time I saw the footage was after the event. And then I thought, well, okay, I’m going to just take this material on a journey and not try to do a timeline or a documentary, but just play with the footage and see what I can do with it. That’s why it exists the way it does. It’s the aftermath of the performance to one extent, but it’s a thing in and of itself, and it occupies two rooms, so there’s no way to have an overview of the work as a whole installation.

Rail: Having spent a lot of time in there over the last couple of days, I can vouch for the fact that it’s not possible to see an overview. You’re constantly thinking, “I’ve seen it now,” and then you think, “No, I haven’t.” So in one way, it seems to defy any sort of interpretation, and on the other hand, the mind really seeks for a narrative, and in the last room, particularly where you’ve got four large screens facing you, you’re standing in the middle and you feel like you’re in the performance. There’s something sort of otherworldly about those silver-clad dancers and the singer walking around.

Boyce: I think this is because there was no script, and people could do what they wanted to do. I mean this is almost the opposite of what my work is known for, in terms of the works from the eighties that were very directed, and it was very clear what meaning might be. The thing that I’ve been working with in the last thirty years is to let go of telling an audience what they’re seeing, and allowing them to move through the work.

Rail: And how did the Dada thing come in? That’s a very interesting trio: you, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Lygia Clark. What was the Dada element meant to bring?

Boyce: I made a work back in 2007 called For you, only you, where I was working with an experimental vocalist named Mikhail Karikis. In talking with Mikhail, it became clear that the way in which he performs these guttural and extended vocalizations traces back to Dada. In our conversations, we talked about the relationship between jazz scat and Dada concrete poetry, and how they actually come from the same root, but are often segregated as practices. So my interest in Dada is connected to my interest in the announcement of a modernist Black vernacular at the beginning of the twentieth century—they’re deeply entwined.

A lot of Taeuber-Arp’s sculptures and costumes relied on the idea of African and Pacific-region art and culture as “primitive”. The idea of Dada was to explore the irrational. And they were exploring this idea through African and Oceanic sculpture. I use one of her sculptures called Head (1920) to create the masks for the audience members as a direct reference to her. But as a founding figure in Dada, sometimes Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s name is mentioned, and sometimes not. She appears and disappears. All of these things are like constellations that allow me to bring different pieces together.

Rail: On a completely different note, the first time you and I were in the same room together was at a meeting twelve years ago, in relation to an exhibition of modern African art in Manchester. And I remember the people were talking about all the difficulties of getting their stuff through, getting stuff made, even existing. And you said that you thought that the focus of resources, money, and attention to the so-called Young British Artists had drawn a lot of those things away from other areas, actually making it more difficult for other areas to proceed.

I was quite impressed by that, because it felt very honest. And I think a lot in the art world, even more so now than then, people don’t want to rock the boat, you know, they want to keep it moderate. And it occurs to me that maybe you’re not having quite such a fight for resources anymore.

Boyce: Everyone’s got a fight for resources, particularly now. Within the arts and many institutions there is a low hum of desperation about resources. But my opinion about the YBAs has changed. I think they did us a service in that they made it possible to talk about money. They made it possible to talk about the desire to have a public platform in the way that my generation was very reticent to do.

I think the YBAs have also been very political and strategic in terms of the way that they’ve utilized not just economic power, but their cultural power in making institutions widen the diversity net. They’ve been in the background. They’ve been part of some of the very structural change that one wouldn’t have expected when they were young artists.

Rail: Wow. Okay, well I just want to bring up one little tiny thing. When we met the other night, you were saying that you started doing life drawing when you were fifteen at East Ham Technical College, and you intimated that drawing is still important to you.

Boyce: I mean, it depends on what you call drawing. People have all sorts of ideas of what drawing is. I like to hold on to a particular thought that Paul Klee shared when he was teaching drawing at the Bauhaus, which is this idea that drawing is just taking a line for a walk.

From pencil to putting different things together, extending a photograph into a repeat pattern. I like the idea that you can take a line for a walk—even a line of thought—and see what it does and where it goes.