SONIA BOYCE, MBE, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. She is Professor at Middlesex University and Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London.

21st May, 2015

The Clocktower Building (Lecture Theatre, CT 102)
16.30-17.30
Free, everyone welcome!

Working across a range of media including photography, installation, text and improvised collaborations. Boyce came to prominence as part of the Black British cultural renaissance of the 1980’s. Her work explores the experiences of being a black woman living in a white society, and how religion, politics and sexual politics form that experience.

“In the broadest sense, my research interests lie in art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this burgeoning field. Since the 1990s my own art practice has relied on working with other people in collaborative and participatory situations, often demanding of those collaborators spontaneity and unrehearsed performative actions. Working across media, mainly drawing, print, photography, video and sound, I recoup the remains of these performative gestures – the leftovers, the documentation – to make the art works, which are often concerned with the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator.”

Boyce has exhibited her work internationally in museums and galleries recently staging a video and performance work Exquisite Cacophony at the 56th Venice Biennale. Other recent exhibitions include: The Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011), Play! Recapturing the Radical Imagination, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2013) and Speaking in Tongues, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2014).

She has taught widely and uses workshops as part of her creative process, and her works can be seen in many national collections including Tate Modern.