It is a tribute to the voices, to the musical talent of many black singers, as well as to their inspiring creativity that the artist Sonia Boyce invites us. But this is not a simply historical and didactic exhibition, worthy of a documentary on the song.
Certainly, among the works of Sonia Boyce exhibited, the visitor will find Devotional Collection, an installation that uses a collection of historical documents. There he will discover various artifacts taken from a collection that the artist has been producing since 1999, thanks to a collaborative project, a collection focusing on black British female musicians. This collective memory project allowed Boyce to collect, with the help of the public, a list of 300 artist names as well as numerous records and even souvenirs. A highlight of the contribution of the black English community to the culture of the planet.
In the 3e room of the Phi Foundation, we will therefore find records from the short-lived but notable group Brown Sugar – formed in 1976 by Pauline Catlin, Caron Wheeler and Carol Simms -, but also from singers like Shirley Bassey, Estelle, Leona Lewis, Beverley Knight … The list is long and includes famous names, but also forgotten names, even if the songs of these singers have marked and still mark the collective imagination.
In the first room, in Feeling Her Way, the exhibition also features contemporary singers Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth and Tanita Tikaram. In this section, a series of video screens show them improvising, performing “sounds of animals, objects, or a short sequence of words, such as the phrase “I am queen” [je suis reine] ”, during a musical session carried out during the COVID pandemic at Abbey Road Studios.
Liberating polyphonies
The celebration of these voices takes shape through a sort of amplification, transformations and metamorphoses accentuated by the installation system that Sonia Boyce has put in place. And it must be said that the Phi Foundation recreates the atmosphere of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, curated by Emma Ridgway, the pavilion which won Boyce the Golden Lion.
In each room, the visitor will hear the songs of all these women resounding. But the different works and rooms also echo each other, creating a form of complex and rich polyphony. Against a certain silence of history, Boyce opposes more than a remembrance or a glorification of the songs of these women, a celebration of the energy of their artistic creativity and of the voice as a tool of freedom…
In her presentation text, Cheryl Sim, director of the Phi Foundation, emphasizes that the voice is like “a declaration of life, resistance and presence”. This is an idea that takes on its full force in the context of an exhibition featuring black singers who have lived in a very white British society…
The aim of this exhibition is therefore not to showcase beautiful sound works, frozen in time, sound works such as are generally desired by the general public.
Boyce thus explains the improvisation session that she allows us to see and hear in Feeling Her Way : “In the first minutes when Errollyn Wallen was guiding the three singers, Jacqui Dankworth, Poppy Ajudha and Tanita Tikaram, she told them that they did not have to produce a beautiful sound. This simple comment resonated with the performers, and during the lunch break they discussed the expectations placed on female singers: to make beautiful music and to have a beautiful voice. One of the prerequisites of “femininity” as it is generally understood, particularly within the popular music industry.” Boyce adds that “in many ways” she wanted to “work with and against such constraints.” “I get especially excited when the performers grunt and scream in a high pitch. Or when, as experimental singer Sofia Jernberg does, the range of the female voice is pushed to incredible heights and depths that can express sounds that are difficult for me to describe. For me, this expansion goes beyond predetermined gender stereotypes.” And there is in these improvisations, sometimes without words, a form of creative freedom, of fascinating emancipatory inventiveness…
As the catalog of the Venetian exhibition indicates, these wordless songs also have links with the scat that the singer Louis Armstrong infused into jazz music from his record Heebie Jeebie from 1926, but also with very old song forms…