British Artist Sonia Boyce on What’s Shaping Her Vision Now

When Sonia Boyce received one of the art world’s most coveted accolades—the Golden Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 for her exhibition “Feeling Her Way” in the British pavilion—it thrust her onto the international stage at a time when the artist was only just receiving belated recognition in her home country. Despite coming of age as part of the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, her far-reaching, conceptual practice, which centers Black British art and life, had long been overlooked.

Now in her early 60s, Boyce has achieved critical acclaim principally for video and installation work that often features a strong musical component and is often also characterized by its documentation of lost histories or its use of improvisational, collaborative performances. In 2023, she joined the roster of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth, and her solo debut has just opened at the gallery’s Chelsea location in New York. “Sonia Boyce: Improvise with what we have” remains on view through October 18.

Installation view of Silent Disco in “Sonia Boyce. Improvise with what we have” at Hauser & Wirth New York. Photo: Thomas Barratt, © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2025, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Apalazzo Gallery.

The show is centered around two films made this year. The subject of Silent Disco is the communal, unguarded joy shown by a group of dancers despite their distinct music choices. It was inspired by the films Dancers, New York (1956) by Roy DeCarava and Funk Lessons (1983) by Adrian Piper. Both explore Black influences on popular culture and self-expression in the West. Boyce’s montage style is echoed in the repetition and layering of stills to make mesmerizing kaleidoscopic patterns that cover the surrounding installation.

Carmen (2025), meanwhile, develops a 2022 project commissioned by King Charles III to celebrate the legacy of Afro-Caribbean immigrants to Britain who were part of the so-called Windrush generation, named for HMT Empire Windrush, one of the boats that brought these new arrivals. Boyce chose to spotlight the Guyanese-British actor and activist Carmen Munroe, who enjoyed a long career on the stages of London’s West End, as well as appearing in Doctor Who and as a protagonist of the 1990s sitcom Desmond’s.

Sonia Boyce, Carmen (still) (2025). Image: Sonia Boyce, © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2025, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Apalazzo Gallery.

“Despite a prolonged and glittering career, and with Carmen receiving a damehood in the King’s New Year Honors List in 2025, it has been difficult to piece together a timeline of her career,” said Boyce. “She doesn’t–as yet–have her own place in the National Theatre Archives even though she has appeared in some of the most iconic productions over the past 60 years.”

The new film is split across two-channels, with one screen drawing from Boyce’s in depth research to note significant milestones in Munroe’s life. The other screen shows her reaction to viewing a montage of her performances, so folding long buried historical documentation into a more personal portrait of the actor’s impact.

As Boyce made final preparations for “Improvise with what we have,” we spoke with her about the cultural influences that have informed her recent work.

Cleo Laine and Jacqui Dankworth

English singer Cleo Laine performs live on stage during filming of a concert for a BBC Jazz Scene television show at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho, London on 18th November 1969. (Photo by David Redfern/Redferns)

The Black British singer Cleo Laine and her husband, John Dankworth, were “the King and Queen of cool jazz in Britain” when Boyce was growing up in the 1960s. Laine, in particular, captured her imagination as a child. “I always felt there was something slightly discordant and intriguingly playful in her voice,” she explained. “As if there was always something else, quite gritty and insistent, she was conveying.”

Laine, who died in July at the age of 97, and her daughter Jacqui Dankworth, who “has the same open and expansive vocal range–although more haunting,” both feature in Boyce’s The Devotional Series. This ongoing project, started in 1999, is an “archival gathering” of women of colour in the British music industry. It is produced in collaboration with members of the public who have volunteered their knowledge about unsung voices from as early as the 19th century up to the present day.

Jacqui was also one of the singers featured in Boyce’s Golden Lion-winning “Feeling Her Way” at the Venice Biennale in 2022. “Jacqui’s voice travels far, almost piercing through walls–like an unbound superpower,” the artist said. “I love that sound is spatial and hard to contain.”

René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929)

A visitor views some of the most famous works by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte (1898-1967) including “Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe” (“This Is Not A Pipe”) (R), at the preview of “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), 15 November 2006 in California. AFP PHOTO / Robyn BECK (Photo credit should read ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

One of the defining works of Surrealism, Magritte’s painting labelled, in French, “this is not a pipe,” pokes fun at our tendency to see an image of an object as the thing itself. It has posed a challenge to Boyce throughout her life because she understands its proposition but can’t help resisting it. “I think, but yes, it is a pipe,” she said, finding the enigma irresistible. “Discord, I think, is something I’ve always been drawn to.”

Boyce credits Magritte with “setting the scene for a particular discussion on semiotics and conceptual art” that she entered as a student of conceptual art in the late 70s and 80s. Magritte’s seminal influence helped her appreciate the many other artists he inspired, including Joseph Kosuth, with his One and Three Chairs (1965), and “a much wrier” Martha Rosler, who made Semiotics of the Kitchen in 1975.

Lorna Simpson, Walk with Me (2020)

Boyce first came across the American multimedia artist Lorna Simpson’s 2020 video work Walk with Me at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Though it was only 14 seconds long, she kept watching for at least 20 minutes. The unusual work presents as a black-and-white photograph of three Black women but their faces have been heavily distorted, with disparate merging components, as though generated by early A.I. They continually raise their eyebrows and blink at the viewer, an effect that is both familiar and eerily incoherent.

“At first, I wasn’t sure what was happening,” Boyce said. “When I first realized that the still image was moving, I doubted myself. Did it move? What’s going on?” She searched for but could not find the invisible join–where the film begins and ends–in the clip’s loop. “It’s clever, uncanny, and stunning,” she said. “It also feeds into my attraction for collage–discord, disjuncture, juxtaposition. Playing with perception and representation.”

Passport to Pimlico (1949)

Passport To Pimlico, lobbycard, Barbara Murray, Paul Dupuis, Stanley Holloway, 1949. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Boyce admits that her love of the British postwar comedic classic Passport to Pimlico “may seem unlikely.” Its absurdist storyline follows the residents of the London neighborhood of Pimlico after a bomb leftover from the war explodes, uncovering buried treasure beneath the city streets. Among the riches is a scroll revealing that Pimlico is, in fact, not a province of Britain but the principality of the Duke of Burgundy of France. As Burgundians, the residents declare themselves independent from Britain and, amid the ensuing chaos, one Burgundian indignantly asks: “Am I a foreigner in my own country?”

“There are many parallels to be drawn with our contemporary world,” said Boyce, who finds it unsurprising that the film was made at the very start of the era, from 1948 to 1971, that the Windrush generation arrived from the Caribbean to help rebuild Britain after World War II. “You could say that was my parents’ generation.”

The interracial tensions that this generation faced in Britain between the 1960s and 1980s are the subject of artist and director Steven McQueen’s Small Axe anthology film series from 2020. “The films are a tour-de-force that had everyone I knew talking (and sometimes arguing) about the subjects raised and how close (or not) Steve represented that time and characters,” said Boyce.

“Sonia Boyce: Improvise with what we have” is on view at Hauser & Wirth New York through October 18.