{"id":55574,"date":"2018-01-22T03:13:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T03:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=55574"},"modified":"2018-01-22T03:13:36","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T03:13:36","slug":"interview-phoebe-boswell-i-always-want-drawings-to-be-open-and-moving-and-shifting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=55574","title":{"rendered":"Interview: Phoebe Boswell \u201cI always want drawings to be open and moving and shifting\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview: Phoebe Boswell \u201cI always want drawings to be open and moving and shifting\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Moving Histories: History and Memory through the Moving Image and its dialogue with other media<\/a>
\n2017-04-13<\/p>\n

Yvette Gresl\u00e9<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nPhoebe Boswell<\/a>, wall drawing, \u201cFor Every Real Word Spoken\u201d, Tiwani Contemporary, 2017. \u00a9 Sylvain Deleu, courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary<\/a>.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

This interview (Yvette Gresl\u00e9<\/a> and Phoebe Boswell<\/a>) was conducted at Tiwani Contemporary<\/a>, 14 March 2017.<\/em><\/p>\n

Phoebe Boswell<\/strong><\/a> was born in 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya<\/a> and raised, as an expatriate, in the Middle East<\/a>. Boswell, who is now based in London<\/a>, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins<\/a>. Her dialogue with her Gikuyu<\/a>-Kenyan born mother (Joyce) and British-Kenyan (Timothy) father underpins her first major multimedia installation The Matter of Memory<\/em> (2014) shown, together with work by John Akomfrah<\/a> and Rashaad Newsome<\/a>, at Carroll\/Fletcher (London) in 2014. In 2015, The Matter of Memory<\/em> was shown at the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art<\/a> (GIBCA) curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose<\/a>. A second major multimedia installation, Mutumia<\/em> (2016) was commissioned and produced for the Biennial of Moving Images<\/a> at the Centre d\u2019Art Contemporain<\/a> in Geneva<\/a> in 2016. In 2017, Mutumia<\/em> was exhibited in Kiev<\/a> for the Future Generation Art Prize for which Boswell was shortlisted; and subsequently awarded the Special Prize which supports a residency program. In addition to The Matter of Memory<\/em> and Mutumia<\/em>, Boswell has produced a number of works notably Prologue: The Lizard of Unmarriedness (It\u2019s All About How You Tell It)<\/em> and The Stranger in the Village<\/em> (both 2015). She was awarded a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship in 2012 and has been an artist-in-residence at the Florence Trust<\/a> and the Konstepidemin, Gothenburg<\/a> (2015). Since 2016 she has been an artist-in-residence at Somerset House<\/a> (London). Boswell\u2019s film Dear Mr Shakespeare<\/em>, directed by Shola Amoo<\/a>, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival<\/a> in 2017. The medium of drawing, as an art practice encompassing animation, is central to Boswell\u2019s oeuvre thus far. Her drawing work is also situated in relation to audience participation; architectural and spatial environments; video art; sound; and found objects and materials.<\/p>\n

Yvette Gresl\u00e9<\/strong>: What was the impetus for the work produced for For Every Real Word Spoken<\/em> at Tiwani Contemporary? It is preceded by Mutumia<\/em> and emerges from this work?<\/p>\n

Phoebe Boswell<\/strong>: A friend of mine sent me an image of naked, older African women lying in a dirt path in Uganda<\/a>. My own immediate visceral reaction was: \u201cWhat\u2019s happening to these women? What\u2019s being done to them? How are they being violated?\u201d I was horrified by this image. Then, my friend sent me the story of the photograph and I discovered that these were Acholi<\/a> women. The Acholi people had been fighting for their land rights for a long time. On this specific day, the government had sent in people to physically remove people. The women decided: \u201cEnough is enough, we\u2019re going to do something\u201d. They took off their clothes. It\u2019s a taboo for men to see women naked, to see their mothers naked. So they took off their clothes and lay down in the path. They affected what happened next. They were not removed from the land that day. Actually, the image that I was looking at is a very heroic image but my conditioning made me read the naked female body and black women\u2019s bodies through the filter of my own conditioning. I was so sure that this was a terrible image…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phoebe Boswell was born in 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya and raised, as an expatriate, in the Middle East. Boswell, who is now based in London, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins. Her dialogue with her Gikuyu-Kenyan born mother (Joyce) and British-Kenyan (Timothy) father underpins her first major multimedia installation “The Matter of Memory” (2014) shown, together with work by John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome, at Carroll\/Fletcher (London) in 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,24,13743,8,10],"tags":[27946,27945,22783,22630],"class_list":["post-55574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-arts","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-moving-histories","tag-moving-histories-history-and-memory-through-the-moving-image-and-its-dialogue-with-other-media","tag-phoebe-boswell","tag-yvette-gresle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55575,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55574\/revisions\/55575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}