Instead of the gallery being a place of observation and a one-way communication from artist to those experiencing their work, it becomes a place of mutual exchange, writes Flora Guildford.
It can be disconcerting to enter a high-profile gallery’s elaborately designed exhibition and become more than just a spectator. The invitation to touch is, inherently, taboo within such spaces. Yet, Sonia Boyce’s An Awkward Relation and Lygia Clark's The I and The You at Whitechapel Gallery has worked to defy such rules, transforming her visitors into participants. Fusing tactility, corporeality and multi-sensorial experience, the joint exhibition between the two artists, Clark’s having been curated by Boyce, are striking examples of the hazy physical boundaries within art.
From left to right: Lygia Clark, Revista Manchete, Rio de Janeiro. Courtesy Associação Cultural O mundo de Lygia Clark Lygia Clark, Superficie Modulada, 1958/1984, Photographer: Marcelo Ribeiro Alvares Corrêa. Courtesy of Associacão Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark.
There is such an abundance of cultural history behind the senses, and the relationship between tactility and places of display, as both Constance Classen and David Howes explore. And this exhibition prompts questioning of why we have come to place such an emphasis on the visual. Touch, as historians argue, was a dynamic and vital element of acquiring knowledge in the nineteenth century, and as private curiosity evolved into public yet elite places of display, the ability to touch became restricted. Boyce’s interpretation and call for participation, then, feels like a liberation of restriction, and a call to renew past methods of learning and experiencing.
The influence of both sculpture and cubism is immediately evident within Clark’s work, and her significance within the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement is understood. Lines and boundaries are rigid, with experimental shapes and a sense of balance that calls back to Piet Mondrian. The I and The You opened at Whitechapel Gallery on the 2nd of October, and charts the artistic developments of Clark alongside her turbulent political contexts within Brazil. Indeed, the spectator can clearly identify the developments of her work as she seems to travel from a dependence on geometric rules to a blurring of when the art stops and the wider world starts. Her 1958 work Unidade (Unit) displays the absence of frame, as planes of colour meet the wall upon which it is mounted. Immersiveness and experimental geometrics are, thus, intrinsically linked within Clark’s work. In addition, the Bicho collection is an even more juxtaposing example of such a tool; with each individual sculpture placed upon a pedestal, there is the notion of a raised, high-value object. Yet, we become a piece within this artistic puzzle, as Clark invites the viewer to handle and bend the pieces, rearranging them and altering them for a short while - until another individual is brought within the web. Art and life, together, is a powerful concoction.
Lygia Clark wearing Mascara Abismo com tapa olho (Abyssal mask with eye-patch), 1986. Photographer: Sergio Gerardo Zalis, 1986.
Courtesy of Associacão Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark.
The reasoning behind the pairing of Boyce's work with Clark’s became clear as I ventured into the second part of the exhibition - An Awkward Relation. Do You Want To Touch? Is Boyce’s 1993 installation that consists of both real and fake hair, and, again, invites the viewer to interact with the piece. This is a chillingly powerful work; hair, once a beautiful and personal display of identity, becomes almost aggressive now removed. And in a juxtaposition of this, we become fronted in the next room with Exquisite Tension - two individuals wound together and linked with their own hair, in a vulnerable reminder of exactly where the unclaimed strands came from. Hair itself is of course an intimate thing - the experience of salons or barbers feels close and vulnerable. And combining such an act with braiding, one of the oldest art forms of humankind, is a striking move from Boyce. It is an act of love, of decoration, of identity. And by rejecting autonomy with Do You Want To Touch?, and then triggering an almost whiplash sensation of walking into the next room and seeing such a personal representation of the weight hair holds certainly reflects back to the notion of the dynamics of sensation. Much like Classen and Howes stipulate, touch is intrinsically linked to learning and expression. Touch is involved with politics, in acts of service, in artworks. It is everywhere, and has a great historical legacy. So why must modernity, as academics within sense studies debate, get rid of this?
Sonia Boyce, Exquisite Tension, 2006, © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024.
Courtesy of the artist, APALAZZOGALLERY and Hauser & Wirth Gallery.
Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation, 2 October 2024 – 12 January 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London. Photo: Above Ground Studio.
This sanitisation of artistic spaces leads me to reminisce of O Doherty’s White Cube. Boyce also challenges the notion of the frame and borders like Clark, with her audiovisual installation and performance work We move in her way. The recurrence of geometry and Dadaism is apparent, drawing back to Clark’s work, yet what Boyce also unlocks is an awareness of sensorial suppression in places of display. There are, naturally, elements of neutralisation and the sacred within the Whitechapel Gallery’s spaces, particularly towards the beginning of the exhibition with Clark’s more architectural works. We move in her way highlights this to an outstanding degree. There is progression to this exhibition; it becomes more and more sensually indulgent, and completely disregards the modern rejection of this and its favour for the discreet. Boyce creates a kaleidoscope of human experience. And, in combination with Clark’s removal of physical boundary, celebrates the tactile imagination.
Boyce’s roots within the British Black Art Movement are evident in this exhibition, as the important message of the history of Afro hair as a commodity echoes through. Yet in this conversation with Clark, Boyce is repositioned, alongside the significance of her politics, as a collaborative and improvising artist. Certainly, this exhibition magnificently captures that ‘something in between’; not quite fully categorised in the art box, but not quite living, either. It poses the question of whether times of formal, sensory-deprived artistic viewing are behind us. And, perhaps instead of the gallery being a place of observation and a one-way communication from artist to those experiencing their work, it becomes a place of mutual exchange. This notion is one that Boyce herself has acknowledged and admired in David Medalla’s 'participation-production-propulsion' exhibition A Stitch In Time (1968-1972), and the parallels between the two artists are transparent - they both work to counter the ‘supermodernity’ and liminal nature that the gallery has the potential to convey, as Marc Auge poses. Thus, An Awkward Relation challenges the idea of ownership and experience within the gallery space, whilst continuing to push forward identity and culture. A return and renewal of the dynamism of early-modern curiosity culture, rejecting the social attitudes and consequences of the late Victorian ‘visual discipline’. Boyce and Whitechapel Gallery work brilliantly to reignite an understanding of how crucial multi-sensorial experience is for artistic embodied understanding, memories and emotions.
Sonia Boyce, Black Female Hairstyles, 1995, © Sonia Boyce. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Courtesy of Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
In a world where the gallery space has long imposed silent boundaries and visual hierarchies, An Awkward Relation invites us to reconsider the transformative power of touch. By directly challenging the conventions of the white cube, Sonia Boyce and Lygia Clark’s work reclaims art as a lived, visceral experience, one that not only allows but calls for our active participation. This exhibition, in its fusion of touch, identity, and collective engagement, reminds us that art doesn’t merely exist to be viewed—it exists to be felt, reshaping our role from passive spectators to co-creators within the cultural narrative.
