With synergies in practice with Claudette Johnson relating to a commitment to drawing, to the drawn body, the Black woman body, the decolonial body, and how it is seen, felt, loved, and cared for, Boswell will take us on a candid and illuminating journey through her own trajectory as an artist. In a series of fragments relating to memory, method, our bodies and the narratives they generate, the overlaps, contradictions, and temporality of our histories and geographies, the power of both our presence and our refusal, Boswell will attempt to interrogate and counter the spaces we occupy and the structures that seek to govern us.
[This talk has been developed from Boswell’s essay On Decoloniality, first presented at Tate Britain in 2018 in response to Professor Walter Mignolo’s keynote for a conference titled Black Europe Body Politics: Coalitions Facing White Innocence, curated by the late Alanna Lockward]
Phoebe Boswell is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, moving intuitively across media from drawing and painting to film, video, sound, and writing, to create immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, gestalt, the layering of sound, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Often inviting the participation of volunteers to create a nuanced collective voice in the making process, Boswell’s work investigates themes including protest, reclamation, grief, intimacy, migration, the body and its world-making. Her recent work considers the dichotomy of bodies of water as both repositories of painful historical experience and sites of renewal and hope.
Boswell’s paintings, drawings, installations, and film & video works have been exhibited and held in collections widely, including The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, RISD, the British Film Institute’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019, and the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017. Boswell was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence and has presented her writing at institutions including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Ford Foundation, and Loophole of Retreat Venice. She has had institutional solos at Autograph ABP, New Art Exchange and the Goteborg Konsthall, and participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Switzerland), Prospect New Orleans, and the Lyon Biennale. Boswell was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in London.
Organised by Professor Dorothy Price (Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Critical Race Art History, The Courtauld) and Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (Doctoral Researcher, The Courtauld) as part of the 2023-24 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series, ‘Black British Art: Histories, Presence, Futures’.
