Leeds Art Gallery Sonia Boyce, 2023.Rob Battersby/Supplied
When London artist Sonia Boyce was busy preparing a complex multichannel video work for the 2022 Venice Biennale mid-pandemic, she tired of people asking how it felt to be the first Black woman to represent Britain at the prestigious international exhibition.
“I kept batting away the question,” she said in a recent interview. But when she finally witnessed thousands lining up to enter the British pavilion, her feelings shifted. “I wept on the stairs. It was the first moment after lockdown had finished and people could gather again. There was a sea of people. I suddenly felt this weight of history.”
That historic moment was the presentation of Feeling Her Way, an exhibition featuring an entirely improvised vocal performance by four women with roots in Black music who had never met before and didn’t rehearse. It won the Golden Lion prize in Venice and comes to Canada courtesy of Montreal’s PHI Foundation, which showed it over the past summer. The show, Boyce’s first major outing in North America, is now touring to Toronto, thanks to the Toronto Biennial of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
It launched the Biennial this week with cacophony: Its nine large screens all play simultaneously and loudly in two ground-floor galleries at the AGO. In the first room, three of the four singers are shown doing some initial vocal exercises – the fourth couldn’t join them because the latest travel ban had stranded her in Scandinavia – and you can see the hesitation in their faces as they figure out how this might work. At the renowned Abbey Road Studios, they stand the required two metres apart, three points in a triangle trying to raise one sound.
“They did keep saying, well, what is it you want us to do?” Boyce told the audience at a press preview. “I said, I just want you to sing together. They were very, very nervous.”
Boyce conceived the project as a testament to Black women in the British music industry and recruited the four singers simply by drawing up a list of candidates and picking the ones who seemed the most interested. They are a disparate group who brought very different styles with the composer Errollyn Wallen leading their group sessions while the singers also provided solos.
The jazz singer Jacqui Dankworth is part of a musical dynasty: her father was the musician John Dankworth and her mother is the jazz singer Cleo Laine, whose father was Jamaican. Poppy Ajudha is much younger, a singer-songwriter of Saint Lucian and British heritage in her 20s, influenced by jazz, soul and R&B.
Sofia Jernberg is an experimental singer who specializes in improvisation and expanding the voice. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden, she appears remotely, filmed in the Stockholm studio once used by ABBA. Tanita Tikaram, perhaps the best known in Britain., is a pop-folk singer-songwriter who was born in Germany to Asian parents; her mother is Malaysian and her father Fijian and British. For her solo, she played the Steinway at Abbey Road.
“The legacy of the sounds they are making comes not only from an African diaspora experience,” Boyce said. “Jacqui is doing a Gregorian chant. She is influenced by both European and African traditions.”
Boyce considers African or Asian a descriptor but thinks Black is a political position, and points to the alliance between Black and Asian anti-racism protestors in the 1980s, a time when she was heavily involved in Britain’s Black art movement.
The video screens are surrounded by photographic wallpaper made from images taken at the studio session while the show includes a display of memorabilia related to Black music in Britain.
Sonia Boyce, Feeling Her Way, 2022 at the Leeds Art Gallery. Commissioned by the British Council for the British Pavilion for the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022.Rob Battersby/Supplied
There are also lots of reflective surfaces in the galleries, in which viewers can see themselves. What they conclude is entirely up to them.
“It is not trying to explain itself as an exhibition,” Boyce told the audience. She laughingly recounted how her art school teachers in the 1980s trained the students in conceptual art, art that started with an idea. They criticized her work as “postintentional:” She was making up the explanation for it after the fact.
“I knew they thought this was a bad way to work, but it was my way.”
The main explanation she gives for Feeling Her Way is that she is interested in improvisation, collaboration and the idea of people who have never met before coming together to create. “Something euphoric happens when you just put people together in a room.”
That euphoria was acute – and poignant – in the midst of the pandemic, when people had not been able to gather and communal singing was particularly dangerous.
“I was thinking about the breath. We were in this state where we couldn’t breathe.”
Today, in a reopened world, the 62-year-old Boyce is still stunned by the international response Feeling Her Way has received, perhaps because it does not feel novel to her.
“I have,” she said, “been doing this stuff for a long time.”
Feeling Her Way continues to April 6 at the Art Gallery of Ontario.