Exhibitions & Art, Drawings/Illustration.
New Art Exchange is proud to present Here, by the award-winning artist, Phoebe Boswell. The exhibition explores what it means to belong and to be free through new and existing artworks. Owing to a personal history rooted in colonial traces and contradictory legacies - upheavals, dualities, geographies, kinships, liberations, silences, and shifts of migration - her work is a navigation of the space between, anchored to what she refers to as a "restless state of diasporic consciousness." Combining draftswomanship and digital technology, she creates immersive installations and bodies of work which layer drawing, animation, sound, video, and interactivity in an effort to find language and make space robust yet open and multifaceted enough to house centre, and celebrate the nuance and complexity of communities, voices, hearts, and histories which, like her own, are often systemically marginalised, simplified, pacified, homogenised, or sidelined as 'other'. Phoebe Boswell was awarded the prestigious Future Generation Prize's Special Prize for Mutumia (2016) in 2017. It combines hand-drawn animation, digital technology, interactivity and voice recordings of women from different backgrounds and is dedicated to women who have used their bodies in protest when not allowed to use their voices. Transit Terminal (2014 - 2020) is a sculptural drawing of twelve charcoal figures, each occupying a purpose-built totemic box which is the same dimensions of an average adult coffin upright. The installation addresses global migration and notions of (un-)freedom and uprootedness. The figures are juxtaposed with an internal flock of chalky migratory birds in flight, drawn into the interior of each box and on the surface wall. I Dream of a Home I Cannot Know (2019) is a largescale video work. Captured from the same place over the course of six years, it documents the quotidian life on a stretch of East African beach - somewhere of deep emotional connection for Boswell; the closest place she could consider 'home', but a place that, like the tide, is impossible for her to hold. I am (2020), a gallery version of Boswell's first public artwork, P L A T F O R M (2020) at Lancy-Bachet Railway Station in Geneva will be shared at NAE. The stop-motion portrait project asked the public to send in self-authored photographs which come to life through Boswell's drawings. Here has been curated by NAE in dialogue with Boswell's 2018 solo exhibition at Goteborgs Konsthall in Sweden.
