I Need To Believe The World Is Still Beautiful

Born in Nairobi to a Kikuyu mother and British Kenyan father, and raised in the Middle East, Boswell combines traditional draftswomanship with digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations. Boswell studied at the Slade School of Art and Central St Martins and her work has been widely exhibited internationally. She was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, and awarded the Special Prize at the Future Generation Art Prize for her interactive installation Mutumia, which subsequently showed as part of the 57th Venice Biennale.

I Need to Believe the World is Still Beautiful continues Boswell’s ongoing work concerned with celebrating and giving agency to the female nude, de-centering the dominant, white, male gaze and saluting women who use their bodies to protest when they haven’t been permitted to use their voices. Created using outtakes from filmed sessions with London-based storyteller Buitumelo in the artist’s studio, Boswell put forward provocations inspired by Audre Lorde and the pair explored how resistance and joy manifest through the bodies of black womxn.