Dissonant Divas: Sonia Boyce, Sound and Collaboration

A breathless, halting male voice breaks the silence with his stuttering sounds and deep grunts, perhaps he is clearing his voice before he begins to speak and then, almost as suddenly, he pauses. The harmonious sounds of choral voices start up and then stop. Grunting, guttural noises emerge struggling from the throat of the incongruous figure who stands in front of the altar, still apparently unable to form words or melodies in response to the choir. His silver, space-age attire serves only to accentuate his strange other-worldly presence which seems entirely out of place in this setting of a fifteenth-century chapel. The sacred chorus starts up once again. More grunting noises evolving into what could be an attempt to sing, to join the choral refrain. The harmonious strains of Renaissance music rise in response. The soft strains of the sacred mass grow and gently rise in unison, amplified by the architecture of the chapel. A buzzing sound emerges from the soloist’s mouth, then short staccato sounds, looping into a murmur, at first inaudible and then forming into breathless, staccato phrases: ‘Sing-to-me, sing-to-me, sing-to-me, sing-to-me . . .’ Finally, the forced guttural sounds of the intruder begin to mesh with the voices of the chorus, weaving in and out, still separate and different but now interspersed between the chorus’ lilting harmonies, strangely accommodated into the intervals of the sacred music.

The three-screen installation For you, only you (2007) is one of three works that made up the exhibition Scat – Sonia Boyce: Sound and Collaboration, presented by Sonia Boyce and the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) at Rivington Place in London between June and July 2013. All three works use image and sound in strikingly different but related ways to collaborative works made by Boyce over a period of several years.

The three-screen installation For you, only you (2007) is a complex work, commissioned by Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, for which Boyce orchestrated the collaboration between the early music conductor David Skinner and his choir Alamire and the contemporary artist Mikhail Karikis, to create a dramatically original and effective work.

The process of making the work and its content are closely intertwined: markedly different protagonists encounter each other and enter into a dialogue to create something new and entirely distinctive. Boyce acts as a catalyst for this encounter and, in the process, moves herself into unfamiliar terrain, ‘trespassing’ in her words into ‘another’s world’. Making reference to Michel Serres’ book, Boyce characterizes her role in the process as that of a parasite, moving playfully from one situation to another.1  She resolutely resists the role of the artist as authoritative and directorial, preferring instead to work collaboratively, allowing artistic possibilities to emerge from the dynamic of human interaction and exchange. The resulting multiscreen installation For you, only you is composed of three screens that echo the different perspectives and artistic personalities convened to create the piece. Forged exquisitely out of this meeting of incongruous elements, Boyce’s work resonates with the surreal beauty of Comte de Lautréamont’s imagined ‘chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’.

© Gilane Tawadros, 2021.

‘Dissonant Divas: Sonia Boyce, Sound and Collaboration’, was first published in Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 35, Fall 2014: 22–31. The exhibition Scat – Sonia Boyce: Boyce: Sound and Collaboration was presented at Iniva at Rivington Place, London, between June and July 2013.