MAM Project 034: Sonia Boyce

Exhibition Period: Wednesday, December 3, 2025 - Sunday, March 29, 2026

Organizer	Mori Art Museum
Curated by	Victor Wang (Adjunct Curator, Mori Art Museum)

Installation view: MAM Project 034: Sonia Boyce, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2025-2026. Photo: Kato Ken.© Sonia Boyce. All rights reserved, DACS & JASPAR 2025 G4025

MAM Project 034: Sonia Boyce features the Japanese premiere of Devotional Wallpaper and Placards (2008-2020) by acclaimed British multimedia artist Sonia Boyce DBE RA - marking her first solo institutional presentation in the country.

Born in London to parents from Guyana and Barbados, Boyce emerged in the early 1980s as a central figure in Britain’s Black Arts Movement. Her practice spans film, photography, drawing, sound and installation to examine the diasporic experience and explore collective authorship.

MAM Project 034 focuses on Devotional Wallpaper and Placards, the most expansive iteration of Boyce’s ongoing “Devotional” series. “Devotional” began in 1999 when the artist collaborated with the Liverpool Black Sisters; during a workshop she invited participants to recall the first record they bought and to name a Black British female singer. This experience prompted Boyce to create a living archive celebrating overlooked Black British female performers. Over the next two decades she collected records, magazine covers and memorabilia donated by members of the public.

By 2020, this communal effort had grown into a room-scale installation comprising a wallpaper densely printed with the names of 200 Black female musicians. In front of these walls lean 100 placards; each placard displays photographs, magazine articles and other ephemera from Boyce’s wider archive.

The installation functions as an act of cultural archaeology and a form of knowledge-building. By being displayed in Japan for the first time, it introduces audiences to an important archive of Black British women’s voices while also connecting to Japan’s own long history of engagement with celebrating Black music and culture - a history that, from the 1960s onwards saw jazz, soul, and R&B find devoted followings and shaped districts such as Roppongi, known for its clubs, discos and nightlife.

At the same time, the work’s participatory spirit continues. Each presentation of “Devotional” invites audiences to see themselves as part of the archive - witnessing, remembering, and carrying forward these stories and names. In this way, the archive is never static; it is sustained in the minds of viewers as they engage, reflect and contribute to its ongoing life.

Sonia Boyce DBE RA and Victor Wang in conversation during the artist talk On Art, Freedom and Collaboration, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 4 December 2025. Photo: Tayama Tatsuyuki.

Sonia Boyce DBE RA and Victor Wang in conversation during the artist talk On Art, Freedom and Collaboration, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 4 December 2025. Photo: Tayama Tatsuyuki.

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About the Artist

Over the course of four decades, Sonia Boyce DBE RA has developed a powerfully original practice that transcends boundaries as an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, photography, print, sound and installation.

Boyce creates immersive and experiential spaces that explore themes of play, disruption and revelation in which the audience becomes active participants. Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference.

She continues to break new ground through her commitment to questioning the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities. In 2022, Boyce presented ‘FEELING HER WAY’, commissioned for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

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.

Since 2014, she has been a Professor at University of the Arts London, where she holds the inaugural Chair in Black Art & Design. A three-year research project into Black Artists and Modernism culminated with the 2018 BBC Four documentary ‘Whoever Heard of a Black Artist?’, exploring the contribution of overlooked artists of African and Asian descent to the story of Modern British art. She holds three honorary doctorates from the Royal College of Art (2019), the Courtauld Institute of Art and Birmingham City University (2023), and an honorary fellowship from Norwich University of Arts (2022).

Boyce has been the recipient of numerous awards. In 2024, the artist received a DBE for services to art in the Queen’s New Year Honours List. In 2016, Boyce was elected a Royal Academician, and received a Paul Hamlyn Artist Award. Between 2012 and 2017, Boyce was Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University and since 2014 she has been Professor at the University of the Arts London. As the inaugural Chair of Black Art & Design, she led on a three-year research project into Black Artists & Modernism, which led to a BBC documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s Hidden Art History (2018).

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