30 Sep 2026 – 30 Jan 2027
17:00-21:00 / thursday to saturday
Phoebe Boswell
curated by Renée Mussai
A gathering, a summoning, perhaps a reckoning also, after us there will be a horizon for the new birds blackens the gallery, cordons off its entrance to visitors, covers its floor with sand, and buoys its walls with hand-drawn visions of bird-bodies in motion and in stillness, in flight and at rest.
Struck by an uncanny primordial, transcendent and communal power permeating from a congregation of seagulls witnessed on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean during a fleeting research visit to Lisbon’s suburban / coastal dwellings in August 2026, artist Phoebe Boswell and curator Renée Mussai sat in Café Ni’lin, a Palestinian restaurant inside Hangar, and contemplated what it means to make work in close proximity to—and in solidarity with—this site of intimate yet powerful resistance, in the midst of an ongoing genocide. The restaurant, architecturally separated from the gallery by latticed security grilles, but sharing air and space and sound, takes its name from a Palestinian village globally recognised for its sustained history of organised community activism and non-violent protest. Situated in the West Bank, it has been subjected to Israeli military occupation since 1967.
The work holds vigil to a temporal world, heavy with acute and global mourning, multiple genocides, climate catastrophe, capitalism’s degradation of land and community, rising neo-fascism and a relentless climate of anti-blackness.
Expanding the artist’s ongoing investigation of kinship, love and liberation sanctuaries through and beyond the underwater worlds of her recent work, the ‘non-gallery’ experience invites a curtailed reflection on dis/placement and occupation, migration and movement—a mediation on porous conceptions of diasporic consciousness and be/longing, personal and collective liberations, centred in the enduring image of the sea as a living site of memory; her waves carrying myriad journeys, yearnings and healings.
The installation posits at once an offence, a refusal, and an invitation: it does not grant entry to its immersive folds, but asks visitors to observe from the vantage point of Café Ni’lin’s interior: to contemplate through a barrier—a blockade—-and to attend to the exhibition’s black register, softly summoning echoes toward new horizons at a time of deep precarity.
The exhibition borrows its title from the resonant, sanguine closing line of the poem ‘Here the Birds’ Journey Ends’ (2008) by Mahmoud Darwish, deployed here as both invocation and declaration.
Charcoal and pastel on paper, 2018
Charcoal and pastel on paper, 2018
Phoebe Boswell is interested in the liminal space between our collective histories and imagined futures; how we see ourselves and each other, and, consequently, how we free ourselves, or imagine freedom. Her figurative and interdisciplinary practice adopts an errant, diasporic framework, working across drawing, painting, film, video, and sound, interactivity, and writing, she creates immersive installation that often incorporate collective participation. Her work addresses themes including protest, migration, grief, intimacy, the body, and the ocean as both sites of historical trauma and renewal.
Boswell has exhibited at galleries including Gagosian, Cristea Roberts Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kettles Yard, and held in collections widely, including The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, RISD, the British Film Institute’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019, and the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017, and was the Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence. She has had institutional solos at Autograph ABP, New Art Exchange and the Goteborg Konsthall, and participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Switzerland), Prospect New Orleans, and the Lyon Biennale. Her recent large scale public art commission by Art on the Underground ‘we move through scales of blue’ (2026) is currently on view at Bethnal Green and Notting Hill subway stations.
Boswell was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in London. She is represented in London by Ben Hunter Gallery and in Berlin by WENTRUP.
RENÉE MUSSAI is a London-based independent curator, scholar and writer of visual culture with a special interest in Black feminist practices. She is Professor of Practice at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg and currently acts as chairperson of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, a trustee for Queercircle, guest lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and guest curated for the Barnes Foundation, amongst other academic and institutional affiliations. For more than two decades until 2022, she was senior curator and head of curatorial & collection at the London-based arts charity Autograph, where she organised numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, commissions, archive, research and publishing projects, including award-winning artist monographs such as ‘Lina Iris Viktor – Some Are Born to Endless Night’ (Autograph, 2021). Her recent publications include ‘Black Chronicles: Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain’ (Thames & Hudson and Autograph, 2025), Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases: 2006 – 2026 (MACK, 2026) and the forthcoming ‘Eyes That Commit – A Visual Gathering’, scheduled to be released by Prestel in 2027. In 2025 Mussai was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of the Arts London.
The curatorial partnership, denoted by a shared attention to responsive, affective and immersive work rooted in an ethics of black feminist praxis and care, has been nurtured over years of friendship and fellowship. Mussai curated Boswell’s solo exhibition The Space Between Things at Autograph ABP in 2018, a show about the body, grief, reclamation, and repair. This is their second formal collaboration and includes a wallpaper print of a drawing by Boswell from 2018, linking it to the first.
Structure financed by the Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts.