The UK artist Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, will present a new work at University College London (UCL) next year as part of the college’s bicentenary celebrations. Three artists-in-residence will also create new works as part of a major public art programme that explores and challenges “the culture of the institution at this important moment in its history”, a project statement says.
Boyce’s work, known as the UCL Legacy Commission, will be located at the college’s historic Bloomsbury campus which opened in 1826. “[Boyce’s] work will result from a creative encounter with a campus that is both steeped in history and alive with forward-thinking ideas. Whether through form, material, or narrative, the work will echo UCL’s enduring reputation as a space of radical curiosity, inclusive excellence, and transformational knowledge,” the organisers say. Boyce is currently professor of black art and design at University of the Arts London.
Meanwhile the duo Kreider and O’Leary will unveil a permanent piece in a new vestibule area in the UCL Cloisters and Wilkins Building. The pair describe themselves online as a poet and an architect who collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of cultural interest and political significance.
Kreider and O’Leary will translate and transform fragments of UCL’s history into a “word-and-image set” that will be transcribed onto pieces of stone salvaged from across UCL, says the statement, which adds that these stone pieces will be used to make “a wall of Spolia”.
Abel Holsborough and Verity-Jane Keefe are the artists-in-residence selected to make works for UCL’s East and Bloomsbury Campuses. Holsborough will be based at UCL’s east London campus on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford, focusing on how communities are built and sustained. In Bloomsbury, Keefe’s work will explore “power, visible and invisible histories and authority”.
Lauren Godfrey, a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, which is part of UCL, will be embedded in the UCL student community, exploring motivations behind the student experience while Sarah Carne, who devised a project for the Tate Exchange programme in 2017, will create a film looking at issues around social parity and the workforce.
“We were the first in England to welcome people of all faiths or none and the first to welcome women into higher education alongside men,” a UCL press statement says. The university first admitted students in 1828. Famous artist alumni who have attended the Slade School of Fine Art include Michael Armitage, Rana Begum and Pablo Bronstein.
