Phoebe Boswell
b. 1982, Nairobi
Lives in London
venue
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM
neighborhood
Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)
About the project
Do We Muse On The Sky Or Remember The Sea, 2021
Multimedia installation, with sound
Courtesy of the artist
Phoebe Boswell’s multimedia installation is an exploration of the present realities and imagined futures of Black life and death in relation to the sea. Inspired by scholar Christina Sharpe’s pivotal text In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and what writer Rinaldo Walcott terms the “Black aquatic,” Boswell investigates bodies of water as archives of Black histories—histories of trade, trafficking, forced migrations, fugitivity, subjugation, and refusal—while suggesting the possibility of a different future. A black horizon was painted across the rounded walls of the gallery, recalling the swell and recession of what could be the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Mississippi River, the Venetian Lagoon, the Mediterranean, or the English Channel. Boswell’s drawings, made directly on the wall, reference archival images as well as her own photographs of individuals she has encountered abroad and in New Orleans.
Accompanying the drawings is an audio piece composed of voices, bass, and saxophone, created in collaboration with renowned jazz saxophonist and composer J. D. Allen. Boswell features the voices of writers, scholars, and artists—including Sharpe, Walcott, and Saidiya Hartman, among others, each responding to the prompts: “What is freedom?” and “What does freedom mean to you?” as well as scholar Keguro Macharia’s stirring provocation, “How will you practice freedom today?” While the imagery references the ocean as a vessel of Black lives and histories, the audio components exist seemingly above the horizon, creating a sky full of promising voices from our present. This encompassing, meditative installation encourages visitors to imagine Black futures and Black freedom with water as a site for a gathering of portraits, voices, and stories from across the African diaspora.
About the artist
Kenyan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Phoebe Boswell grew up in the Arabian Gulf and London, where she studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. Boswell’s production includes charcoal and pastel drawings of enormous proportions that recount on a grand scale the griefs, traumas, journeys and triumphs of her subjects in a manner that recalls the allegorical epics of medieval tapestries. She explores themes of migration and belonging in the visual recounting of her own history and the stories of her subjects, which often take on a mythic quality. Her work is infused with digital media, such as animation, film, interactivity, and audio, elements that she uses to represent feminine and marginalized subjects. Boswell has won several awards and accolades, including the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017 and the 2020 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. EXPO Chicago hosted her solo presentation She Summons an Army, and Sapar Contemporary, New York, hosted Phoebe Boswell: Take Me to the Lighthouse (both 2018). Her work was shown at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015). Her collaborative film Dear Mr Shakespeare was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, in 2017.
Phoebe Boswell, Do We Muse On The Sky Or Remember The Sea, 2021. Multimedia installation, with sound, dimensions variable. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks