Phoebe Boswell

Tiwani Contemporary is pleased to present For Every Real Word Spoken, a solo exhibition of the work of Phoebe Boswell. Boswell is known for combining traditional craftsmanship and digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations.

The exhibition gathers a series of new, near-life-size nude pencil portraits of the artist’s friends, fellow artists, curators and acquaintances, some of whom Boswell had worked with previously on her interactive installation Mutumia (2016). The portraits show women standing up, holding their mobile phones to their chests as if to take a selfie, but showing the devices' screens to the viewer, in a pose inspired by Adrian Piper's Food for the Spirit (1971). On each of the phone screens, Boswell has hand-drawn a code: when scanned with a mobile device, it will link online, revealing an article, image, thought, personal truth or observation directly chosen by the woman in the portrait. Drawing on a lineage of black female literary and artistic ancestry, Boswell's new works radically re-negotiate the relationship between viewer and model, and tell the stories of a networked community that cannot easily be contained within a single image.

Phoebe Boswell studied Painting at the Slade School of Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins, London. She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015) and the Biennial of Moving Images, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva (2016), and is currently a Somerset House artist-in-residence. She is shortlisted for the 2017 Future Generation Art Prize and her British Council-commissioned film Dear Mr Shakespeare, directed by Shola Amoo, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.