Sonia Boyce // Helen Johnson at the ICA 1 February – 2 April 2017 Preview: 31 January 2017

Press Release: November 2016

The ICA is pleased to announce solo exhibitions by artists Sonia Boyce and Helen Johnson. Sonia Boyce’s We move in her way explores questions around power and play between audience and performer within a live improvisation, then uses the documentation to create a multimedia installation. Helen Johnson: Warm Ties uses painting to highlight the relationship between Britain and colonial Australia. Johnson places the viewer in a space in which to reflect on the mentality of British colonisers on Australia. Both highly acclaimed artists will be exhibiting in the Lower and Upper Galleries, respectively, 1 February – 2 April 2017.

Sonia Boyce: We move in her way Upper Gallery

IMAGE: Sonia Boyce’s We move in her way. Photographer: George Torode

Sonia Boyce’s piece We move in her way involves the exploratory vocal and movement performances of Elaine Mitchener, Barbara Gamper and her dancers : Eve Stainton, Ria Uttridge and Be van Vark, with an invited audience. The title of the work suggests two possible readings: that ‘she’ dictates our movements; or that we obstruct ‘hers’, with both interpretations suggesting power is at play.

Boyce has a participatory art practice where she invites others to engage performatively with improvisation. In this process, she encourages contributors to exercise their own responses to the situations she enables, where she steps back from any directorial position to observe the activities and dynamics of exchange as they unfold. Once the performance is played out and documented, Boyce reshapes the material generated, in what she calls “recouping the remains”, to create the artwork as a multimedia installation.

We move in her way was created in this way as a performative laboratory, in which the audience and performers negotiated the ICA Theatre space around sculptural objects and their own bodies. Play and playfulness unfolded during the open-ended live performance, sparking a breakdown of assumed order between performers and audience. The dynamics of power-play shifts between the masked audience, the performers and the sculptural objects created as a means to facilitate touch and being together, whilst remaining distinct.

Notions of difference and relatedness make reference to the enduring influence of Dada within We move in her way. Processes of collaborative improvisation are exemplified in the piece, referencing the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in the late 1960s and 70s. Some of the masks worn by the audience are a re-working of Sophie Tauber’s ‘Dada Head’ (1920) – itself an appropriation of Oceanic sculpture. The final artwork takes another playful turn to create a multi-layered and multimedia installation.

Helen Johnson: Warm Ties Lower Gallery

IMAGE: Helen Johnson, Great Depression, 2016, acrylic on canvas, synthetic fabric. Courtesy the artist

Warm Ties will be the first public solo exhibition of Australian artist Helen Johnson, in collaboration with Artspace, Sydney. Johnson weaves and overlays historical and contemporary signifiers creating points of tension and reflection through the medium of painting. In this exhibition, the complex colonial relationship between Australia and Britain is dealt with on the level of the body, using large-scale paintings mounted to a structure that zigzags through the space.

An economy of images is established within and between paintings; some are given precedence, others made barely legible. The paintings are the size of theatre backdrops, in excess of the body, becoming sets before which to act. Mindful of the ICA’s location on The Mall, close to the seat of power that served as the originary point of Australia’s colonisation, some images concerning Australia’s fraught relationship to British culture and power are freighted back to their point of origin. Humour plays an important role in reflecting on this return – or perhaps more accurately, persistence – of the repressed.

In one painting, a man masturbates as the lyrics to the Australian national anthem are whispered into his ear: ‘For those who come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share’, a far cry from some of Australia’s current strict immigration policies. He stands before an image of Queen Victoria overlaid with handcuffs, whips and shackles used to punish colonial convicts. Hands reach from inside this image to smear the paintwork.

The zigzag structure within the exhibition is derived from the layout of Canberra, Australia’s capital city. Designed by Walter Burley Griffin, this pre-fabricated modernist city was imposed on Ngunnawal country in the early 20th century. Here, the angles of Masonic symbols imbued in Burley Griffin’s plans are reduced to a gesture, a mere squiggle across the space.

This body of work resituates 19th century images of the White Man as an imperialist brute, a sycophant and a greedy solipsist, scaling them up and reasserting them – they are the founding historical legacy for non-Indigenous Australians. The works repurpose and re-examine images of rituals used by colonists in an attempt to legitimise their occupation of Australia; ‘civilised’ procedures that thinly masked widespread massacres, dispossessions and attempted destructions of sophisticated, ancient cultures.

Co-commissioned by ICA, London and Artspace, Sydney

The development and presentation of Helen Johnson’s Warm Ties is supported by Commissioning Partner the Keir Foundation

The exhibition will be touring to Chapter, Cardiff (1 July – 24 September 2017).

Co-commissioned with

Commissioning Partner

Touring Partner

-Ends- Notes to Editors For further press information and images, please contact: Victoria Heald | Press Manager ICA | [email protected] | +44 (0)20 7766 1407

Listings information: Sonia Boyce: We move in her way Upper Galleries Helen Johnson: Warm Ties Lower Gallery 1 February – 2 April 2017 Gallery opening hours: Tue–Sun 11am – 6pm, except Thurs, 11am – 9pm. Closed Mon.

The ICA is a membership organisation with Day Membership set at just £1 to visit exhibitions during gallery opening hours. No Day Membership is charged on Tuesdays.

Full Annual Membership available from £30 Students and under-26s Annual Membership available from £10

Further information on Annual and Day Membership can be found here.

About the ICA Founded in 1946, the ICA seeks to embrace the urgency surrounding contemporary art and culture. Continually looking forward, the ICA lays claim to an extraordinary legacy, being home to the Independent Group, as well as playing a pivotal role in the development of Pop Art, Op Art and Brutalist Architecture. It charted the course of Punk, Performance, Independent Cinema and Young British Art, while showcasing numerous international artists, from Yoko Ono to Gerhard Richter. The ICA has always supported interdisciplinary practice, encouraging artists to experiment and explore unresolved ideas. Comprising film screenings, exhibitions, talks and events, the ICA Programme can be experienced at our base on The Mall, via our website and social media, or as 'Off-Site' projects at alternative venues, nationally and internationally. The ICA has a longstanding fascination with the evolution of Pop culture in our mass digital age. ica.org.uk

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About Sonia Boyce Sonia Boyce (b. 1962) is a British born artist who lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art at East Ham College and Stourbridge College of Art & Design (1979-1983). At the heart of Boyce’s work are questions about the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities. Since the 1990s she has been working with the improvised actions of others to create multimedia artworks. Boyce is Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, Chair of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London and is the Principal Investigator for a 3-year AHRC-funded project ‘Black Artists and Modernism’. In 2016, she was elected a Royal Academician and was named a winner of the 2016 Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Afuera! Art in Public Spaces, Centro Cultural España Cordoba, Argentina (2010); The Impossible Community, Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2011); 8+8 Contemporary International Video Art, 53 Art Museum, Quangzhou (2011); Play! Recapturing the Radical Imagination, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art 7 (2013); Sonia Boyce: Scat – Sound and Collaboration, Rivington Place, London (2013); Speaking in Tongues, CCA- Glasgow (2014); S/N: Signal to Noise, Whitney Museum of Modern Art/The Kitchen, New York (2015); Liberties – 40 Years Since the Sex Discrimination Act, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2015); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); and, Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre (Dada Nice), Villa Arson, Nice (2016). We move in her way is supported by Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England.

About Helen Johnson Helen Johnson is an artist based in Melbourne. Recent solo exhibitions include Barron Field as part of the 2016 Glasgow International, Slow Learners at Château Shatto, Los Angeles, 2015 and Cafe Fatigue at Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2015. She has recently exhibited work as part of Painting. More Painting at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; In my absence at Jocelyn Wolff, Paris; and Pleasure and Reality at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. In 2015 she published a book titled Painting is a Critical Form, developed from a PhD in Fine Art completed at Monash University where she is also a lecturer. Johnson is represented by Château Shatto in Los Angeles, Pilar Corrias Gallery in London and Sutton Gallery in Melbourne.

About Elaine Mitchener A movement art vocalist noted for her unique melding of styles ranging from contemporary classical, gospel, jazz, sound poetry, free-improvisation and movement, Elaine Mitchener has worked with an eclectic array of leading musicians and artists, Irvine Arditti, Henry Grimes, Heiner Goebbels, Deborah Warner, Christian Marclay, Sonia Boyce, Attila Csihar, Dam van Huynh, Max Eastley, Alexander Hawkins, Tansy Davies, Phil Minton, Evan Parker, Alasdair Roberts, David Toop, and Jason Yarde. Recent festival performances include: 56th Venice Biennale, ULTIMA Contemporary Music festival, Oslo, Cheltenham Jazz Festival; English National Opera, Between Worlds, Café Oto, La Dynamo, Paris, National Theatre, White Cube, Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Weserburg MOMA, Bremen, Hepworth Wakefield. Recent projects include: Industrialising Intimacy (UK tour) (WP earsthetic festival); The Second Key by Tansy Davies with BCMG; The Nude Voice with choreographer Dam Van Huynh for the Wellcome Collection, THIS IS A VOICE exhibition with artist Sam Belinfante, Block Universe Festival; Wysing Music Festival; Sweet Tooth ‘open session’, Aldeburgh Prom.

About Barbara Gamper Barbara Gamper is a visual artist and choreographer who lives and works in London. She graduated from Goldsmith’s College, London in 2016. Between 2001 and 2004 Gamper studied contemporary dance in Berlin and performed in different cities around Europe, including Berlin, Szczecin, Moscow, Athens, and Bolzano. From 2006 onwards, Gamper has collaborated on numerous artistic projects within the field of performance, moving image and music including Tanztheater-global, SDNA and Uzuri. Recent festivals and group exhibitions include Shunt, London (2008), The Place. London (2010), OPA On Performance Art Bios, Athens (2011), Satellite Projects, Whitstable Biennale (2012), Panorama, Bolzano (2012), Aesthetica Film Festival York (2012), Alternativa, Gdánsk (2014), Saturday Walks at Serpentine Galleries with Leonor Serrano Rivas, London (2014), BAU, Bolzano, (2016).