Gilane Tawadros, 'Peeping Toms'
In: Peep: Sonia Boyce. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1995.
Swathed in wrappings of tracing paper, the objects in the Cultures gallery of Brighton Museum and Art Gallery have been temporally obscured from view by the intervention of the artist Sonia Boyce. The transparent glass display cases which usually present artefacts and objects from around the world have been hidden from view behind opaque paper sheeting. To see the objects now, you are forced to move up close to the glass cases and peer through the uneven shapes cut out of the tracing paper. Looking through these strangely shaped openings, your view is limited, partial and incomplete and you are made to feel self-conscious about the act of looking, as if the artist was determined to make of us peeping toms. But perhaps this is what museums are all about.
Even in the late twentieth century, museums have never lost sight of their origins as cabinets of curiosities. Now when we enter the space of the museum, we enter another world where we move from one room to the next, gazing at the exotic objects laid out before us like a sumptuous feat set out for our eyes to consume. Like delectable sweetmeats beyond our reach, these artefacts offer up the promise of unfamiliar, illicit pleasures which are visible but unattainable, to be seen but not touched. In the Cultures gallery, Sonia Boyce has circumscribed our gaze and forced us to acknowledge this very act of looking in a museum as an illicit act. To look in Boyce's museum space is to engage in a compelling but somewhat dubious activity. At first glance, on entering the space, your gaze falls not on the objects or on the display cases, but rather on other visitors caught in the act of looking.
Over a number of months, the artist has traced the shadows cast by the ethnographic objects as they hang like strange fruit in the display cases and it is only through these elongated silhouettes that we are able to see the museum artefacts and the artist's own works alongside. It is as if these objects, removed to the museum space and tinged with a melancholic aura, have been reduced to shadows of their former selves, like freaks at a peep show which we can never fully see or understand. Our view of these objects, it seems, is inevitably partial and obscured and our role as viewers inevitably that of compliant voyeurs.