Sonia Boyce is Manchester University's first artist-in-residence. A woman of Afro-Caribbean origin born in Britain, Boyce is interested in identity, difference, and marginality. These are also subjects of academic interest in areas of study that include History of Art, the section of the University where Boyce's studio is located. Boyce has had the use of all the assets of the University, from its staff to its art collections, and her cross-disciplinary interests have led her to contacts in the departments of Sociology and Social Anthropology as well as to the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Museum.
The residency is a collaboration between the University, the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), the North West Arts Board, and Cornerhouse. The North West Arts Board supports the making and dissemination of the arts in Manchester and the region, and has close links with Cornerhouse, where Sonia Boyce's exhibition Performance is being held. Through its collaborations and commissions, the Institute of International Visual Arts seeks to reflect a culturally diverse spectrum of artistic practices, curatorial voices and critical perspectives in contemporary art and to make these accessible to a wide public. Through four areas of activity - exhibitions, research, eduction and publications - the Institute seeks to extend the intellectual, social and geographical boundaries of debate on contemporary visual art practice between different cultures and continents. Boyce's residency builds on previous collaborations with the artist and relates to a number of other artistic projects initiated by the Institute which presume that the work of visual artists and the process of making art is a form of critical investigation and knowledge.
In adopting the title Performance for the exhibition that comes out of the Manchester residency, Boyce does not allude to the word's traditional meaning in relation to the visual arts, as a form of physical activity close to theatre. She is interested in a definition, appropriate to a university, involving investigation and inquiry, and exchange of knowledge and ideas between colleagues in the different areas of a university's activity.
To perform a role well is to perform it in a way that is appropriate to the place. An early question that Boyce asked on arrival in the University was: 'Who am I?' It was asked not in the hope of discovering some core identity, but to identify herself as an artist with individual interests and ambitions, in a particular ambience, Manchester University. Boyce's work has also been with the inhabitants of the city, over eighty of whom responded to advertisements to become participators in, and part of the subject of, Boyce's exhibition.
What emerges from this is that for Boyce the studio is one, but not the exclusive site of creativity. Art making is a discursive process that results from the sharing of ideas. The Cornerhouse exhibition is a body of work that is the outcome of a period of intensive making, but it is also a kind of research report which builds on work and ideas already in train (not everything was made in Manchester), and is accompanied by this book which is both a record and a series of reflections on her work by Manchester University colleagues and others. The book, again, is not intended to be conclusive so much as the product of contacts between professionals working in related fields of cultural expression whose ideas have been stimulated by encounters thrown up by the residency. This book is not an exhibition catalogue in the conventional sense of being a summary and in effect a closure. It is more like a bridge carrying Boyce's work and areas of cultural debate on to further stages.
Boyce's residency reflects the way the boundaries of art have become less distinct in recent years, as attention has shifted from the finished object as the sole repository of aesthetic worth towards interest in processes and procedures, and the investigation of ideas, materials, techniques and the work of art's physical and institutional contexts. Boyce's exhibition at Cornerhouse includes work that is identified as hers on account of the range of ideas that it develops, not through consistency of materials (materials and techniques are unusually varied), and still less on account of an identifiable core style. Cornerhouse, in parallel, is a freestanding exhibiting institution for contemporary art that has built up a reputation for innovative exhibitions which have not become fixed within an established pattern or style. Cornerhouse has no permanent art collection and an exhibition there, unlike a museum exhibition, is not seen in the shadow of a permanent display that is by inference canonical.
Not for the first time in a Cornerhouse exhibition, the work in this one spreads beyond the gallery to poster sites where issues of mainline and marginal identity are presented (Manchester citizens were photographed for Boyce in the gallery and the blown up photographs paired with the same people wearing Afro wigs). The Manchester residency and the exhibition and book that accompany it acknowledge the traditional locations of art making and display, the studio and the art gallery, while showing that art that wishes to avoid falling into a conventional mainstream profits by maintaining contact with institutions where marginality and difference are valued.
Paul Bayley, Exhibitions Department, Cornerhouse
Professor Andrew Causey, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester
Aileen McEvoy, North West Arts Board
Nikos Papastergiadis, Department of Sociology, University of Manchester
Gilane Tawadros, Institute of International Visual Arts