Sonia Boyce talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work.
Boyce, a recent Golden Lion-winner at the Venice Biennale, was born in London in 1962 and first made an impact through her figurative drawings before shifting to what she calls a “multi-sensory” practice.
Sonia Boyce, Exquisite Tension (2006) © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZOGALLERY and Hauser & Wirth Gallery
Over the past three decades, her art has been a social experience, as she has worked with individual and collective collaborators to create performances, video pieces and installations. They reflect on a wealth of subjects, from personal and collective memory, to sound as a conveyor of subjective feeling and cultural experience, to the dynamics and meanings of space and environment, and to questions of value and power and who bestows and holds them.
Sonia’s art is about people but also formed by them—people are her raw materials. She talks about her interest in power and authorship and the shift in her career, away from drawing to relational and social practice.
Sonia Boyce, We move in her way (production still) (2016) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2017 Photo: George Torode © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024 Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZOGALLERY and Hauser & Wirth Gallery
She discusses the transformative experiences of seeing work by the Fenix feminist art collective, Frida Kahlo and visiting the 1981 exhibition in Wolverhampton, Black Art an’ Done.
She reflects on William Morris’s wallpaper designs and the different ways in which they have manifested in her work. She discusses the connections between Dada and jazz music, and the influence of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and much more.
Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate, “What is art for?”
• Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation and Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 12 January
• Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way, Toronto Biennial, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, until 6 April 2025
• AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS: Works from the Enea Righi Collection, MUSEION—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, until 2 March 2025
• Listen to Sonia Boyce talking about Feeling Her Way, in the episode of The Week in Art podcast from 22 April 2022, Venice Biennale Special.
This podcast is sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, the arts and culture app.
The free app offers access to a vast range of international cultural organisations through a single download, with new guides being added regularly. They include several of the UK museums in which Sonia Boyce has had important shows, including the Manchester Art Gallery, where she exhibited in 2018, the Whitechapel Gallery, where, as we have heard, she has a show in the autumn of 2024, and the two UK venues that hosted the tour of Sonia’s Golden Lion-winning presentation at the Venice Biennale, Feeling Her Way—Leeds Art Gallery and Turner Contemporary. If you download Bloomberg Connects, you’ll discover that the guide to Turner Contemporary has a feature on that exhibition, including a video of a conversation between Sonia and the composer Errollyn Wallen. It also has features on the gallery’s current and recent programme.