Sonia Boyce engages with the artist and sound theorist Brandon LaBelle, who guides us through the artist's poetics, considering sound as a form of radical inclusion, a medium capable of generating interaction, narratives and new understanding.
Sound and listening construct processes that challenge human individuality and conventional languages. Sound, by its porous nature, and the cultural and symbolic manifestation of music fostering social connections, exert an influence on everyone's capacity to participate.
Sonia Boyce's project for Palazzo della Ragione saw her collaborate with three students from the "Gaetano Donizetti" Higher Institute of Musical Studies in Bergamo, who were invited to perform and improvise popular songs in the heart of Bergamo's "Città Alta." The act of singing from balconies is an explicit reference to the lockdowns, during which people sang songs from inside their homes to support each other in what was a time of crisis. These actions inspired the artist, for whom singing itself represents a gesture of altruism and empathy.
After
Rachel Whiteread by Angelo Antonio Moroni and Pietro Roberto Goisis,
The Joy of Cacophony is the second book in a series of short essay collections inspired by the site-specific art projects specially conceived for GAMeC at Palazzo della Ragione, a symbolic, time-honored location within the city of Bergamo that embodies the values of community life and participation. The artist was asked to name an author who interests her—be it a researcher, a philosopher or a scholar—and whose thinking could be said to underpin the project, with a view to finding a path through the complexities of the present day, starting from the work produced but without necessarily lingering on it.
Brandon LaBelle is a
musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator, educator and editor based in Berlin.
His work, based on performance,
sound installation, recording and use of found sounds, focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017),
The Imaginary Republic (2014-19),
Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and
Surface Tension (1998-2002). LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges.
In 1995 he founded
Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing house supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought.
Sonia Boyce (born 1962, London, where she lives and works) came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning
British Black Art scene—becoming one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her work purchased by the Tate Gallery, with
paintings that spoke about
racial identity and
gender in
Britain.
Her works have subsequently been purchased by several public collections. Sine the 1990s Boyce's practice has taken a more multi-media and improvisational turn by bringing people together speak or sing about the past and the present.
Since 1983, Boyce has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally. An abbreviated account of exhibitions and monographs include : Sonia Boyce : “Speaking in Tongues”, (Gilane Tawadros, Kala Press 1997), “Annotations 2/Sonia Boyce : Performance”, (Mark Crinson, Iniva – The Institute of International Visual Arts 1998) ; “Video Positive : the other side of zero”, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (2000) ; “Recent Sonia Boyce: La, la, la”, Reed College, Portland – Oregon (2001) ; “Century City: art and culture in the modern metropolis”, Tate Modern, London (2001) ; Sharjah International Biennial 7, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2005) ; “Devotional”, National Portrait Gallery, London (2007) ; “Crop over”, Harewood House, Leeds and Barbados Museum & Historical Society (2007/2008), “For you, only you” (Paul Bonaventura, Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford University and tour 2007/2008), “Praxis : Art in Times of Uncertainty”, Thessaloniki Biennial 2, Greece (2009) ; “Like Love”, Spike Island, Bristol and tour (Green Box Press, Berlin, 2010) ; “Afro Modern”, Tate Liverpool and tour (2010) ; “The Impossible Community”, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011) ; “Play! Recapturing the Radical Imagination”, Göteberg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 7 (2013) ; and, “All the World's Futures”, 56th Venice Biennale (2015).
In 2007, David A Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce jointly received the History of British Art Book Prize (USA) for the edited volume
Shades of Black Art in 1980s Britain, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva – the Institute of International Visual Art, and AAVAA – The African and Asian Visual Artists Archive. In the same year she was awarded an MDE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, for her services to art. Sonia Boyce won Golden Lion Award at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022.
Boyce has recently completed an AHRC Research Fellowship at Wimbledon College Art and Design, University of the Arts London, with her concluding research project “The Future is Social”.
She is currently Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, in the School of Art and Design, Chair of Black Art and Design accross tge six colleges of the University of the Arts London (UAL) and Principal Investigator for the Arts & Humanities Research Council funded project “Black Artists and Modernism” (UAL/Middlesex University, London). Curator, Okwui Enwezor invited Sonia Boyce as one of the artists for the 56th Venice Biennale, where she presented
Exquisite Cacophony (2015).
