Phoebe Boswell

Biography

Phoebe Boswell’s solo exhibition “Bahrainona” was held at the Bahrain National Museum, and it consisted of portraits and recorded conversations.

Boswell was born on 2 January 1982 in Nairobi, the daughter of Timothy, a pilot, and Joyce, a teacher. When she was two, the family moved to Oman, and three years later to Bahrain. There she attended St. Christopher’s School in Isa Town, then Hurtwood House. Next came London: Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) and the Slade School of Art at the University of London. After her studies she returned to Bahrain to make sense of her childhood as an expatriate child. The result was the exhibition “Bahrainona” and, besides it, in 2007, the solo show “REPRESENT” at the Al Riwaq Gallery. There she also took part in founding the arts society Elham.

Her graduate film “The Girl With Stories in Her Hair” (2009) was commissioned by the National Gallery and made at Central Saint Martins. Boswell wrote, directed and animated it and performed in it herself; the music was composed by Andres Franco Medina-Mora. The film was nominated for the Public Choice prize of the British Animation Awards, for Best Student Film at the Bradford Animation Festival, and for Best Animation at the Rushes Soho Shorts. That same year she also made a short work, “Bunty”.

In 2010 she directed and animated “Sorry To Hear You Impaled Yourself on the Roof of Edinburgh College of Art”, commissioned by the studio 12foot6; the story in it is told by Andrew Morgan. In 2011 she made the animation for the BBC4 programme “The Pendle Witch Child” (presented by Simon Armitage, directed by Ros Ereira). In 2012 she created an animation in collaboration with the poet Kate Tempest for the project “Smile for London” on the London Underground. In 2016, commissioned by the British Council and the GREAT Britain campaign to mark 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, she made the film “Dear Mr Shakespeare”, selected for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. In it an imaginary conversation with Shakespeare is built around “Othello”: it deals with discrimination and skin colour, with references to Boswell’s own experience.

She won the first ever Sky Academy Arts Scholarship (2011; by other accounts 2012). In 2017 she was awarded a special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize in Kyiv. As a result her work “Mutumia” was shown at the Venice Biennale that year.

Her exhibition list is a long one. Boswell’s work has been shown in the UK, the US, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and Italy. Group exhibitions include the Royal Academy Summer Show in London (2005), the annual exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (2011), the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2015, the installation “The Matter of Memory”), the Biennale of Moving Images in Geneva (2016, “Mutumia”), the 1:54 contemporary African art fair in Brooklyn (2016) and Prospect.5 in New Orleans (2021). Solo exhibitions include “For Every Real Word Spoken” at Tiwani Contemporary (2017), “She Summons an Army” at EXPO Chicago and “Take Me to the Lighthouse” at Sapar Contemporary in New York (both 2018), and “The Space Between Things” at Autograph in London (2019). Critics describe her work as layered storytelling about cultural roots, identity and migration. It speaks of frailty and belief systems, of the way society and culture misrepresent the female and Black body, and of the female nude as a site of power and heroism. In 2021 the Royal Photographic Society awarded her its Lumière Award.