Phoebe Boswell, Breaking Down the Master’s House, film still, courtesy of the artist 2017.
Born Nairobi, Kenya (1982), lives and works in in London, United Kingdom
Breaking Down The Master’s House 2017
part of Mutumia (2016)
pencil marks
Courtesy of the artist
Breaking Down The Master’s House is a working ‘drawing’ extracted from Phoebe Boswell’s ‘Mutumia’ (2016), an interactive installation which honours women who have used their bodies in protest when they have not been permitted to use their voices. In this larger work, a six-channel 30min looped projects an army of hand drawn naked women onto all walls of the gallery, gesturing through various emotional states of resistance. The women are silent, but the floor is fitted with a hidden series of sensors connected to soundtracks of various women’s voices, which are activated when the audience enters the room, and stands in acknowledgement of these women. In extension, this singular looped, hand-drawn animation takes its title from Audre Lorde’s cautionary words “for the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. It depicts a woman, naked, with her back to us, pushing against the wall she is facing, kicking it, punching it, occasionally turning to acknowledge us, until she fades and another woman takes her place and resumes the activity. As a projection, it activates the space onto which it is being projected, contextualising it as a space to be pushed against, alerting us to the oppressive nature of it. In the gallery, these women disrupt the white walls of the white male dominated space of the art world. In situ at the Lagos Biennial, Boswell’s pencil marks thrash against the train, itself a symbolic object of colonial oppression.
