Rendering the Alternative: Nine Nights - Artist Commission
The project team wanted to create an imagined world. One free from the restrictions of Government and Planning Policy, censorship and the narratives of William Beckford and John Cass.
We asked the invited artist, to create a new piece of artwork(s) which reflects, explores and is inspired by the key aims of the project. Centring the deep-set belief that racism, enslavement, British colonialism and historical erasure are totally unacceptable. We want audiences to gain a deeper awareness of the space and the legacy of the African and Caribbean diaspora without Cass and Beckford being centralised.
Artist Residency Programme
The focus of the commission is the conceptual. Sonia E Barret is the inaugural artist in residence for the Rendering the Alternative programme. The residence asks artists to consider: how would you, if you could, bring justice to the spaces that Cass and Beckford’s statues occupy? How would you memorialise the Africans, whose lives were affected by the institutions and individuals in the City of London, who profited from their enslavement?
9 Nights’ by Sonia E Barrett
Find out more about the Ceremony of Quit Rents
About the Artist
Sonia E Barrett performs Composites of plants, animals, elements and people to create interventions that presence their objectification and commodification. She also thinks about how to change perceptions of phenomena in “nature” that are a given. The work seeks to create new questions where there was a kind of certainty that has to do with the hegemony of normative western European values.
Born in the UK, of Jamaican and German parentage, Sonia E Barrett grew up in Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Cyprus and the UK. She studied literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and her MFA at Transart Institute Berlin/New York.
Her work unpacks the boundaries between the Determined and the determining with a focus on race and gender. She makes sculptural works so she can run her hands along the fissures and manifest strategies for multiple compatible existences and mourn.
Her sculptural practice includes place making with a view to assembling communities under the threat of climate to (Re) claim space as well as instituting permanently.
Sonia is a MacDowell fellow and has been recognised by the Premio Ora prize, NY Art-Slant showcase for sculpture and the Neo Art Prize and most recently, the sculpture prize at the Darkar biennale. She has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Tate Britain, 32 Degrees East Gallery, Kampala, Uganda, the Heinrich Böll Institute Germany, the British Library, The Museum of Derby, and the Kunsthaus Nürnberg. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries, including the OCCCA California, the NGBK Berlin, Tete Berlin, The Format Contemporary in Milan and Basel, John Hansard Galley, Southampton and the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Philadelphia.
Her works have been published and written about in the International Review of African American Art, The British Art Studies Journal, Black History 365, Kunstforum International, Protocollum Journal, ELSE, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Open University Geography Textbooks and Contemporary & América Latina.