RPS Awards Talks...Phoebe Boswell with Renée Mussai

Our Awards Talks Series - in partnership with Autograph - welcomes leading individuals to talk about how they use photography as artists, scientists, educators, publishers and curators. All our speakers are recent RPS Award recipients who have been recognised for their contribution to photography. 

Recordings from the series can be seen here: https://rps.org/awardstalks

Phoebe Boswell's figurative and multidisciplinary practice denotes a commitment of care for how we see ourselves and each other. Underpinned by a porous, diasporic consciousness, she explores notions of inter-personal freedom, protest, grief, intimacy, migration, embodiment and world-making through the prism of race and gender, collective histories and possible futures. Working intuitively across media, she centres drawing but spans animation, sound, video, writing, interactivity, performance and chorality to create layered, immersive installations which affect and are affected by the environments they occupy, by time, the serendipity of loops, and the presence of the audience. Boswell's drawings, installations and film & video works have been exhibited widely internationally and are held in collections including the UK Government Art Collection, the BFI National Archive and The Studio Museum, New York. Her practice has received accolades including the Future Generation Art Prize's Special Prize (2017), the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (2020), she is a Ford Foundation Fellow, and was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School at Rome (2019). Boswell received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021.

Renée Mussai is Senior Curator and Head of Curatorial & Collection at Autograph, London where she has worked for almost decades, advocating for a diverse constituency of contemporary artists and co-commissioning a range of artistic programmes. A scholar-curator with a special interest in African, Black European and diasporic lens-based practices, Mussai lectures and publishes internationally on photography, visual activism, cultural politics and curatorial care. Her recently edited volumes include the award-winning ‘Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night – Dark Matter’ (2020); her writing has appeared in various books, journals and anthologies, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. She is Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg; Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London; and regular guest curator and former non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She currently serves on the Royal Photographic Society’s Awards, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion advisory committees, as well as Fast Forward: Women in Photography, amongst others.

Our first three conversations of 2022 will be held in partnership with Autograph, a London-based international, non-profit photographic arts charity with a remit in photography and film, critically engaging with issues of cultural identity, representation, human rights, and social justice.

The 'in conversation' will be followed by a public Q+A. Questions will be taken by Zoom chat or can be emailed in advance. Your Zoom link will be sent in PDF with your booking confirmation. 

Portrait of Phoebe Boswell by Emile Holba @emileholbaphoto