About the work

Sonia Boyce has created Put Your Hands Together, 2024, especially for Whitechapel Gallery to accompany the exhibition Sonia Boyce: An awkward Relation, 2 Oct 2024 – 12 Jan 2025.

Sonia Boyce’s edition for Whitechapel Gallery, incorporates a motif of clapping hands used throughout the artist’s work and her Whitechapel Gallery exhibition. The hands here reference the hands-on aspect of her exhibition - whether this is by playing, or making noise (applause) in regards to participation and performance. Sonia often uses bubble writing often in her work. The type of writing teenagers would use writing their favourite band name on their pencil case or on school books.

About the artist

Sonia Boyce (b. 1962, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound, and installation. In 2022, she presented FEELING HER WAY for the British Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference. In 2016, Boyce was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and in 2023, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Science in Boston. In 2014 she became a Professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art & Design. In the 2024 King’s New Year Honours List, Boyce was awarded a Damehood.

Selected exhibitions

Boyce’s work is held in the collections of Tate, London, UK; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Arts Council Collection, London, UK; The Government Art Collection, London, UK; British Council Collection, London, UK and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include:

Gamec, Palazzo della Ragione, 'Sonia Boyce. Benevolence', part of: 'Pensare Come una Montagna', (Bergamo, Italy, 2024); Spreeufer, 'How (not) to present a collection: A re-presentation of One of Six Acts. Ain’t Misbehavin', (Berlin, Germany 2022); Apalazzo Gallery, 'Sonia Boyce. The Disorderly', (Brescia, Italy, 2022); Simon Lee Gallery, 'Sonia Boyce. Just for the Record', (London, UK, 2022); MIMA Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, 'Sonia Boyce. In the Castle of My Skin', (Middlesbrough, UK, 2021); Manchester Art Gallery, 'Sonia Boyce', (Manchester, UK, 2018); ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, 'Sonia Boyce. We move in her way', (London, UK, 2017); Edith Russ Haus für Medienkunst, 'Sonia Boyce. For you, only you', (Oldenburg, Germany, 2017).