Following Feeling Her Way at the British Pavilion, the Golden Lion winner for best national participation at the 59th Venice Biennale, Sonia Boyce presents The Disorderly. The show consists of two video installations brought together with printed wallpapers and a new body of digital photographs. The sensual transgressions of masquerade and the carnivalesque, as well as a consideration of the historical within the contemporary, are brought together in two projects at APALAZZOGALLERY for the exhibition The Disorderly by artist Sonia Boyce. The gallery presents Crop Over (2007), a two-screen video installation with Shaggy Bear Wallpaper (2021), and a re-working of one of the performances from Six Acts (2018) titled Ain’t Misbehavin’ (2022), a two-screen video installation with wallpaper.
Crop Over (2007) looks at the relationship between the Lascelles Family – the owners of Harewood House, a stately home in Leeds, England, and slavery in Barbados, the Caribbean. From the perspective of Barbados, the legacies of slavery through sugar plantation life can be seen in longstanding folkloric characters like Shaggy Bear, Mother Sally, Donkey-Man and StiltWalker. As the films unfold, cultural historians comment on these characters who appear throughout the Barbadian Crop Over harvest festival. These commentators give us a brief insight into Crop Over’s history and contemporary meaning.
The Disorderly also reconsiders Six Acts (2018), a project that attracted worldwide attention for the takedown of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, ‘Hylas and the Nymphs’ (1896) by John William Waterhouse, held by Manchester Art Gallery. Boyce has re-worked the performance documentation to re-stage a sense of reverie and abundance that characterises the other performances of that night by Lasana Shabazz and the drag collective Family Gorgeous (Cheddar Gorgeous, Anna Phylactic, Venus Vienna and Liquorice Black). Lasana Shabazz begins the film Ain’t Misbehavin’ (2022) in front of a painted portrait of a black male, the first work of art to enter the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery in the nineteenth century. The painting by James Northcote Othello, The Moor of Venice (1826), was originally titled ‘The Moor’, meaning simply ‘The Black’.
