Dissonant Divas

Three works made up the exhibition Scat—Sonia Boyce: Sound and Collaboration, presented by Sonia Boyce and the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva) at Rivington Place in London from June through July 2013. The three works use image and sound in strikingly different but related ways to collaborative works made by Boyce over a period of several years. In her deliberate resistance to making sense, Boyce places her works in a tradition of modernist artistic practice that draws on Dadaist poetry, the work of John Cage, and black British female performers who disrupt our expectations of the relationships among word, image, and sound. Like the stuttering black bartender in Blonde Venus, these dissonant divas reclaim inarticulacy and nonsense to assert other histories and experiences that are situated at the very center of our own lived experiences of the world.