BENEVOLENCE, 2024, Video
- Medium
- Six-channel synchronised Ultra HD video with sound. 9 minutes 23 seconds






























GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea returned to the Palazzo della Ragione venue, in the heart of the old town of Bergamo, with a new site-specific commission BENEVOLENCE, conceived for the Sala delle Capriate by the British artist Sonia Boyce.
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Since the late 1980s, Boyce has addressed themes such as identity, social dynamics as well as racial and gender marginalization in an explicitly political manner. More recently, she has concentrated on experimenting with a relational practice that combines the aesthetic and political values of participation and collaboration, producing works that focus on history and “acoustic” memory, bound together by a love for music, sound and the voice, more closely linked to the notions of difference, intersectionality, and intercultural/transnational appropriation.
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Through the development of multimedia projects—photographs, videos, and installations— she documents the gestures of performative improvisation enacted by those involved in her works. In this perspective, collaborative processes negotiate the artist’s authorship and authority through dialogue and interaction with the community of reference, thus favouring collective creativity. Boyce creates spaces that foster relationships based on improvisation, in which reflection on the interaction of the personalities of each finds its outcome in the construction of a community, without altering its nature.
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The project for Palazzo della Ragione led the artist to approach the Bergamo area and its history with curiosity, and to focus her attention on traditional Italian folk songs that have long represented a powerful form of social commentary and a lyrical means of translating and sharing existential conditions. Boyce embarked on a collaboration with three students from the “Gaetano Donizetti” Higher Institute of Musical Studies in Bergamo, who were invited last Autumn to perform and improvise popular songs in the heart of Bergamo’s “Città Alta.”In particular, in the preliminary phase of the project, the artist and the students noted how Bella Ciao - a key song in the country’s democratic history - has now become a symbol of global and trans-generational resistance.
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This song provided the starting point for Boyce to undertake a major reflection on the meaning of music, its value over time and its ability to unite, but also to divide. Far from bearing ideological intentions, the song resonated spontaneously among passersby during the filming, amid the balconies of Piazza Vecchia, and it thus demonstrated how its strength lies in the very sense of community that it promotes, and in the sense of dignity, peace, and hope that it invokes.
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The act of singing from balconies is an explicit reference to the lockdown period, during which people sang songs from their homes to support each other in a time of trouble. It is an action that inspired the artist, for whom singing itself represents a gesture of altruism and empathy, and folksongs in particular are a means of coming together and holding out a hand:
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“Singing spontaneously and publicly, in such moments of social anxiety, attests to the capacity of the human voice to transport our feelings and engender a form of social tenderness.”
This dialogue between Sonia Boyce and the students shows a great deal about the process that led to the staging of BENEVOLENCE, the environmental video installation produced for the exhibition at Palazzo della Ragione, and the various levels that can be traced both to the embryonic development of the project and to the visual rendering of this work, which originated from a performance made into a film.
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The filming took place in Piazza Vecchia and in the adjacent Angelo Mai Civic Library, in particular in the Sala Tassiana, historically destined for the meetings of the Minor Council of the Municipality, and in the archive of the San Michele all’Arco book tower: a place of worship then deconsecrated in 1955. Environments that preserve and embrace a plurality of voices, of fragmentary memories, and ones that reveal their hybrid nature of being both private, reserved areas and at the same time spaces destined for the res publica, i.e. for norms and laws.
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It is the ornate vaults of the Sala Tassiana, with its seventeenth-century frescoes of grotesques and allegories of the virtues of good rulers by Pietro Baschenis, that inspired the title of the work. It is Benignità (Benevolence) - as depicted by a woman about to breastfeed animals - which the artist chooses to place the emphasis on.
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The exhibition brings together in six “visual monuments” occupying the Sala delle Capriate in Palazzo della Ragione—also an emblematic place of encounter between the public and private spheres—the work generated by the artist’s mediation of the video and photographic material filmed during the spontaneous performance in Piazza Vecchia and the sound improvisation of the singers in the library spaces. Benevolence explores how we experience music, sound, both collectively and intimately, through the juxtaposition of bodies and indoor and outdoor scenarios and settings, alternating between the various forms of sound interaction that inspired the singers.
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On the occasion of the exhibition, a new volume of the series of essays, published by Lenz and GAMeC, linked to the exhibition projects staged in the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, will be published. The author will be the artist and sound theorist Brandon LaBelle.
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The exhibition is part of the project Thinking Like a Mountain: the cultural program promoted by GAMeC for the two-year period 2024–2025 that involves the territory of the Province of Bergamo with the aim of creating a pathway for sharing artistic experiences aimed at exploring the principles of sustainability and community.
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Related theme: Sound / Singing

Put Your Hands Together
2024

BENEVOLENCE
2024

On My Way
2022
FEELING HER WAY
2022

In the Mix: Shirley Songs
2022

In the Mix: Skunk Sputnik
2022

Ain't Misbehavin'
2022

In the Mix: Hippy Liberty
2022

In the Mix: Disciples Together
2022

In the Mix: Mel & Kim Respect
2022

In the Mix: Alexandra B’s Dress
2022

Miss Elizabeth Welch 1933 – 1940 / a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square
2021

Shirley Bassey / Goldfinger
2021

Sade / The Sweetest Taboo
2021

Sheila Chandra / Ever so lonely MONSOON
2021

Polystyrene / X-ray Spex OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!
2021

P. P. Arnold / Just call me angel of the morning
2021

Six Acts
2018

Just One Minute More
2016-2022

Exquisite Cacophony
2015

Plastic
2013

Move
2013

Gather:Justicia
2010

Is this Love That I’m Feeling?
2010

Oh Adelaide (with Ain Bailey)
2010

Taken
2009

Drift
2008

Devotional Wallpaper and Placards
2008 - 2018

For you, only you
2007

1930s to 1960s – The Rivington Place Portfolio
2006

Devotional II
2005

Devotional, 2004
2004

Lover's Rock
1998
Related theme: Performance

BENEVOLENCE
2024

Put Your Hands Together
2024

Yes, I Hear You
2022

In the Mix: Alexandra B’s Dress
2022
FEELING HER WAY
2022

In the Mix: Shirley Songs
2022

In the Mix: Skunk Sputnik
2022

Ain't Misbehavin'
2022

In the Mix: Hippy Liberty
2022

In the Mix: Disciples Together
2022

Family Gorgeous Smudged
2022

In the Mix: Mel & Kim Respect
2022

On My Way
2022

Sheila Chandra / Ever so lonely MONSOON
2021

Sade / The Sweetest Taboo
2021

Shirley Bassey / Goldfinger
2021

Miss Elizabeth Welch 1933 – 1940 / a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square
2021

P. P. Arnold / Just call me angel of the morning
2021

Polystyrene / X-ray Spex OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!
2021

The Audition
1997 - printed 2018

Six Acts
2018

We move in her way
2017

Just One Minute More
2016-2022

Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre (Dada Nice)
2016

Exquisite Cacophony
2015

Move
2013

Dance of Belém
2011

Gather:Justicia
2010

Oh Adelaide (with Ain Bailey)
2010

Taken
2009

Devotional Wallpaper and Placards
2008 - 2018

Drift
2008

Crop Over
2007

For you, only you
2007

Exquisite Tension
2006

1930s to 1960s – The Rivington Place Portfolio
2006

Devotional II
2005

Devotional, 2004
2004
Related theme: Participatory / Collaboration

BENEVOLENCE
2024

Yes, I Hear You
2022

Ain't Misbehavin'
2022
FEELING HER WAY
2022

Family Gorgeous Smudged
2022

The Audition in Colour
1997 - printed 2020

In the Castle of My Skin
2020 - 2021

The Audition
1997 - printed 2018

Six Acts
2018

We move in her way
2017

Paper Tiger Whisky Soap Theatre (Dada Nice)
2016

Exquisite Cacophony
2015

Move
2013

Dance of Belém
2011

Gather:Justicia
2010

Oh Adelaide (with Ain Bailey)
2010

Taken
2009

Devotional Wallpaper and Placards
2008 - 2018

Drift
2008

Crop Over
2007

For you, only you
2007

Exquisite Tension
2006

Devotional II
2005

Devotional, 2004
2004

Tongues
1997

Untitled (Kiss)
1995

They're Almost Like Twins
1995