Artist Sonia Boyce Will Be the First Black Woman to Represent the UK at the Venice Biennale

The artist Sonia Boyce has been
selected to represent the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in
2021. The 58-year-old will be the first black woman to represent
the country at the art world’s most prestigious
exhibition.

“You could have knocked me down
with a feather when I got the call to tell me I had been chosen to
represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2021—it was like a bolt
out of the blue,” Boyce says in a statement. “Obviously, I’m
extremely honoured, excited, and nervous. I’m eager to start this
creative journey, exploring the experience with others who agree to
work with me along the way.”

Boyce, who became a Royal
Academician in 2016, is
currently a professor at
University of the Arts London, where she is chair in Black Art & Design. The artist and
academic was a key figure in
the Black-British art scene in 1980s Britain. Her deeply personal
work often reflects on the country’s relations to race, class and
gender. Her practice spans
performance, drawing, print, photography, and audio-visual
elements. She often collaborates with other artists and the public,
and since the 1990s her work has also had an improvisational tenor,
as she invites a wide range of people to speak, sing, or move in
relation to the past, and the present. 

The artist was commissioned to
present a major solo exhibition at the UK pavilion by the British
Council. The council will
name a mid-career associate curator to work alongside Boyce on the
exhibition later this year.

“Boyce’s work raises important
questions about the nature of creativity, questioning who makes
art, how ideas are formed, and the nature of authorship,” Emma
Dexter, the British Council’s director of visual arts,
commissioner, and chair of the British pavilion selection
committee, says in a statement. “At such a pivotal moment in the
UK’s history, the committee has chosen an artist whose work
embodies inclusiveness, generosity, experimentation and the
importance of working together.”

Selection committee member
Hammad Nasar, curator and senior research fellow at the Paul Mellon
Center for Studies in British Art, said in
statement: “In her
drawings, multimedia installations and performances, Sonia Boyce
has consistently probed one of society’s big questions: how do we
live with difference?” He added: “In times of polarisation and
division, the committee felt that Boyce’s improvisatory,
collaborative and participatory practice offers the potential to
inject the 2021 exhibition with surprise and
hopefulness.”

Boyce was the subject of a BBC
documentary Whoever Heard
of a Black Artist? in
2018, in which she traveled the country tracing the history of
black artists and Modernism. Shortly after, Tate belatedly
acquired examples of her work for its collection at the Frieze art
fair in London; 400
black and white photographs capturing a 1997 performance in
Manchester, during which Boyce had invited members of the public to
try on afro wigs.

Boyce was one of the four women
artists included in a groundbreaking 1989 exhibition called “The
Other Story,” which was the first retrospective exhibition of
British African, Caribbean, and Asian Modernism. At the time shows
of work by the mainly white YBAs dominated the
headlines.

“The legacy of that exhibition
really has penetrated quite far and wide within British
consciousness and the art establishment,” the artist told Artnet
News in 2018. “Tate for a while now has been acquiring a lot of
works from that exhibition as well as trying to really reconfigure
and rethink its relationship to what has been taking place here in
the UK.”

The pavilion will be a follow up to last year’s solo exhibition
of the artist Cathy Wilkes, which was curated by Zoé Whitley, the
incoming director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery. Whitley
worked with Boyce as a member of the advisory board for the
Black Artists and Modernism research project. “I’ve
witnessed firsthand her passion and commitment to expanding
our understanding of British art histories, making space for
acknowledging a broader spectrum of artists who have contributed to
our culture and making clear that these histories do indeed belong
to all of us,” Whitley tells Artnet News.

“Sonia’s not only actively re-writing the canon through her own
dynamic practice, but she models a generosity of spirit in
collaborating with artists and institutions across the country and
internationally. She exhibited at Chisenhale in 1988 as part of the
landmark exhibition Essential Black Art. Her voice and her work are
no less essential today.”

The 59th Venice Biennale will
take place between May and November 2021. It is not Boyce’s first time in Venice. She was
included in the late curator Okwui Enwezor’s main exhibition “All
the World’s Futures” in 2015. She is currently the subject of a
solo exhibition “In the Castle of My Skin” at Birmingham’s East
Side Projects, which is due to travel to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art
later this year.

Notable recent exhibitions
include a solo exhibition at the ICA London in 2017, and a solo at
the Manchester Art Gallery in 2018, which caused a stir when
she temporarily removed
a 19th-century painting from the galleries in a comment about the depiction of women’s
bodies in art history.

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