imagine…: Sonia Boyce: Finding Her Voice (S38EP7 BBC One Monday 7 November 2022)

Sonia Boyce: Finding Her Voice – Acclaimed artist Sonia Boyce is followed by Alan Yentob as she gets ready to become the first black woman to represent the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale, making history. Why is that relevant? Because many people consider this storied, expansive exhibition to be the most prestigious and significant exhibition of contemporary art in the entire world. Sonia is under pressure to pull off the biggest performance of her career.

Her Venice Pavilion is the result of a 20-year obsession with a passion project. The “Devotional Collection,” a sizable collection of artefacts documenting the contributions of black women to the British music industry, is what Sonia is bringing to Venice.

This enlightening and timely documentary explores Sonia’s 40-year artistic development as well as the two months leading up to the Biennale’s opening week. The film begins with the large-scale pastel portraits of Sonia Boyce that heralded the arrival of a major new talent in the 1980s and continues through her experiments with interactive hair sculptures in the 1990s before focusing on performance art made through improvisation, play, and experimental singing, which continues to fascinate her today.

At the Biennale this year, Sonia discovers that she is a part of a larger discussion. The first artist of Algerian descent to represent France is her close friend and former Brixton neighbour Zineb Sedira, and the first black woman to represent Scotland is her former student Alberta Whittle. The Biennale is dominated by female artists for the first time in its history. Could this be a turning point in contemporary art history as well as for Sonia Boyce?

Airdate: Monday 7 November 2022 at 22:40 on BBC One

Season 38 Episode 7

Imagine… is a wide ranging arts series first broadcast on BBC One in 2003, hosted and executive produced by Alan Yentob. Each series usually consists of 4 to 7 episodes, each on a different topic.