Sonia Boyce (born in 1962) came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black-British art-scene of that time – becoming one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her work purchased by Tate, with paintings that spoke about racial identity and gender in Britain.

Her works have subsequently been purchased by several public collections. Since the 1990s, Boyce’s practice has taken a more multimedia and improvisational turn by bringing people together to 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’, Göteborg 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: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain’, published by Duke University Press in collaboration with Iniva – the Institute of International Visual Arts, and AAVAA – the African & Asian Visual Artists Archive. In the same year she was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, for her services to art. Boyce has recently completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Research Fellowship at Wimbledon College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL) with her concluding research project ‘The Future is Social’. She is currently Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, in the School of Art & Design, Chair of Black Art & Design across the six colleges of UAL, and Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded project ‘Black Artists & 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).

Charles Andrew Bothwell (born in 1981), better known by his stage name Astronautalis, is an American alternative hip-hop artists currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
After gaining some recognition in local circles in Jacksonville, Florida and competing at Scribble Jam, Astronautalis self-released his debut album, You and Yer Good Ideas, in 2003. He eventually signed with Fighting Records and the record was re-released in 2005, followed by his second album, The Mighty Ocean and Nine Dark Theaters, in 2006. He released the third album, Pomegranate, on Eyeball Records in 2008. In winter 2009, he toured with the Canadian indie rock band Tegan and Sara through Europe, and supported them again through the spring of 2010 in Australia. His fourth album, This Is Our Science, was released on Fake Four Inc. in 2011. He is a descendant of James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, which is one of the reasons why his lyrics often deal with historical fiction. Andy has worked with Sonia Boyce on a previous performance-based project called  Exquisite Cacophony with the vocalist Elaine Mitchener (2015).

Michelle Tofi graduated from London Metropolitan University with a first class honours degree in Film and Broadcast Production in 2011. Since then she has specialised in cinematography and self-shooting, having content she shot for BBC Worldwide screened in 76 million homes across the globe, and travelling to shoot in France, Sweden, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar. Her corporate clients have included Ray-Ban, the Gaurdian, YouTube and Adidas although her passion is for fiction and art filmmaking, and she has collaborated extensively with artist Sonia Boyce, MBE on three video projects. Michelle is also keenly interested in documentary work, and is currently producing her first feature length documentary, “Drag it Out in the Open ».

Richard Thomas is a Sound Recordist and Musician.  He’ll record most sounds (within reason) and a number of them have been featured on TV, film and videos on the internet  (some feature cats).  He will sometimes make noises (sometimes under duress).  He has been accused of making Art before.  His favourite cake is Battenburg.  He regularly refers to himself in the third person.

Cette bibliographie succincte présente quelques clés de lecture de l’exposition Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre.

Artificial Hells de Claire Bichop permet d’inscrire la pratique collaborative de l’artiste au sein d’une filiation artistique héritière de l’avant-garde dada, au situationnisme, au happening jusqu’au renouvellement des pratiques participatives autour de 1990 à partir d’un retour de l’espace social au sein du modernisme européen.

Gilane Tawadros, Mark Crimson, Sophie Orlando offrent des outils de compréhension du travail de Sonia Boyce, à la fois dans sa pratique de la peinture et du dessin des années 1980, tout comme dans sa pratique performative développée à partir des années 1990.

La lecture de l’ouvrage Ways of Seing de John Berger rappelle combien l’image artistique est médiée par son mode de présentation (curatorial, ou discursif) et invite

by Richard Thomas, 2015 – 2016

I’m a sound recordist. It’s a job that a lot of people don’t even realise exists, but it’s my job to capture the sync sound for picture as it happens. Most people assume ‘doesn’t the mic on the camera do this?’, they assume that whatever the camera ‘sees’ can be heard- more often than not all the camera mic will pick up will be a distant perspective on the action with high background noise and any movement the camera operator makes will be very present. So, my job is to get microphones closer to the things we want recorded. But in an improvised performance, how do I know what we’re going to want to record?

In my line of work I usually find that planning is really important to getting results; the more I know about what is happening, the more likely I’ll have the tools and personnel to be able to cover and deal with a given situation. However another skill I often have to employ is improvisation: something will be changed at the last moment, someone will neglect to tell me something they didn’t think was relevant and that can make a huge difference to me. I’ll be constantly trying to second guess what’s going to be thrown at me by people whose main concern is what something looks like. I’m also no stranger to improvisation in a more general artistic context- I’ve performed free improvised music for a number of years including work with artists in other contexts, such as dance and visual art. However, in this case I’m improvising more as a technician (which I’m possibly less comfortable with).

My first thoughts when Sonia approached me about this project were if and how the performance would be contained- how many performers there would be? What sort of sound they could be making? What the space would be like? All these questions were open ended so I packed kit for as many situations as I could think of happening and assumed (wrongly) that as the process went on that I’d have more of an idea what was going to happen during the performance and looked into where I could get additional equipment if required locally and the process emerged.

Over the two days before the performance, we started looking around the grounds at Villa Arson and found so many interesting spaces. I really enjoyed the brutalist aesthetic of the architecture, and also how its structure allowed green spaces and plants to grow in sections. I ended up taking far too many photos of the place… I also considered what impact each space would have on me being able to capture the performance, either looking at the amount of space available (the more restricted, the closer I could get microphones on stands and be able to cover the area adequately) and how much background noise there would be.

The day before we also filmed both Andy and Vania working with the students. To be honest, the things both of them were doing with the students were pretty much the scariest things I could imagine dealing with for something like this on a technical level: Andy’s group were doing very low level dialogue – sometimes whispered to each other (and some of his group weren’t the most extrovert of people either), while Vania’s were climbing on top of each other. The reasons for this are that low level dialogue requires close microphones to pick it up, even if you were standing a few metres away you’d struggle to hear what the person is saying, and this is with your brain concentrating on them (see the ‘cocktail party’ or Haas effect) and microphones can’t distinguish individual voices like your brain can. Personal microphones would need to be mounted on the body of the performer and could easily get moved/unstuck and pick up clothing noise easily, so adding movement with climbing on top of each other would limit what they would pick up.

So, when the performance (or “happening”?) began I decided to use as many personal microphones as possible on a variety of performers, mainly so we got a mixture of languages close up and one who said they had an idea based around a song. I also had a stereo microphone setup on a boom to capture a wider perspective. However, I still needed to have a portable rig and it was too late in the day to order in more equipment (let alone enough to have a microphone on everyone…). I had to make sure the microphones and radio transmitters were securely attached to the performers and wouldn’t move, even when doing some physical things. Even after it had started I thought we may stop before moving location, however it didn’t- I was stuck with this setup and had to improvise, running after the performers!

Afterwards, I thought that both through the aesthetic of the buildings and the nature of what the performers were doing that it did have a very 1960s experimentalist feel to it, where I imagine the students of, say Black Mountain College with John Cage and Merce Cunningham may have done similar things- they’re reconsidering what can be considered art, music or performance and not letting things like training determine whether you’re “allowed” to perform like this or not. It’s the sort of environment which encouraged experimentation and allowed performance art to come into its own.

When I’ve worked with Sonia before I know she doesn’t really mind seeing crew and equipment, also I think part of drew me to my job is my ability of avoiding photographs. I do like the fact that the ‘workings’ are revealed (and I’m also doing that here a little).