Over the past four decades, Sonia Boyce DBE RA has cultivated a multidisciplinary practice that explores play, language and pattern, while questioning the nature of representation and authorship. For her inaugural exhibition, Improvise with what we have, with Hauser & Wirth, Sonia Boyce will present two new films alongside her latest wallpaper and photographic works.
In the first film on view, Boyce weaves together footage captured at a silent disco, a paradoxically hushed event in which a roomful of dancers responds to music heard only through headphones. Inspired by both Roy DeCarava’s ‘Dancers, New York’ (1956) and Adrian Piper’s ‘Funk Lessons’ (1983)—groundbreaking works by artists who have centered Black culture—Boyce’s ‘Silent Disco’ (2025) revels in the dancers’ unguarded gestures, flickering emotions and ephemeral exchanges. Using montage and repetition, among other techniques, the film takes these lively impressions ‘for a walk,’ as Boyce would say, quoting Paul Klee’s adage (‘Drawing is like taking a line for a walk’). As the film begins, only ambient noises are audible to the viewer: we hear the soft shuffle of feet, train cars passing outside the venue, murmurs that erupt into sudden bursts of song. Gradually, the music builds, coaxing the dancers into collective movement, though their headsets are tuned to two separate channels. Harmony arises, improbably, from dissonance.
A key subject in Boyce’s recent work, the silent disco is not a party, but rather a framework for close listening, improvisation and collective performance. This sense of openness and play continues in the exhibition space itself. Boyce has taken still images from ‘Silent Disco’ and arranged them into repeating, kaleidoscopic patterns to create wallpaper installations within the gallery, blurring distinctions between the artwork and its means of production and display. Boyce’s installation immerses us in subtle cues from the original performance—the lights, the uncanny silence, the dancers’ whirling bodies—suggesting that at any moment, the disco could begin again.
In ‘Carmen’ (2025), Boyce delves into the life and career of trailblazing Guyanese British actress Carmen Munroe, who reshaped perceptions of Caribbean migrants in the UK through her performances in such West End plays as Lorraine Hansberry’s ‘A Raisin in the Sun,’ and her roles on popular British television programs including ‘Doctor Who: The Enemy of the World’ (1967 – 1968), ‘The Persuaders’ (1971 – 1972) and ‘Desmond’s’ (1989 – 1994). Part portrait, part historical document, Boyce’s film traces Munroe’s impact as an artist and activist.
‘Carmen’ was first conceived in 2022 as part of a landmark commission by King Charles III marking the 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush on Britain’s eastern shore. The royal commission brought together leading contemporary artists to create portraits honoring 10 pioneering members of the Windrush Generation—Caribbean migrants who, like Carmen Munroe, arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971. Despite facing widespread political, economic and social discrimination, these brave individuals played a pivotal role in the reconstruction of postwar Britain.
During Boyce’s portrait session with Munroe, she amassed such a wealth of material that she was compelled to develop a more expansive project. The result, shown here for the first time, is a powerful two-channel film: one screen lingers on Munroe as she watches a montage of her own performances, while the other screen displays significant dates and milestones in her career. The two feeds interweave fact and sentiment, history and personal anecdote, illuminating Munroe’s ambition, tenacity and prowess in her craft, while emphasizing her own voice and perspective.
