Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London, 1995 | Softcover, 44pp | 10.5 x 30 cm
An artist’s book produced to accompany Sonia Boyce’s 1995 installation at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, working with the Museum’s collection of non-Western art and ethnography. Peep documents Boyce’s intervention, exploring themes of observation, interpretation and her identification with an “ancestral” past.
In the installation, ethnographic objects were shrouded in tracing paper, forcing viewers to peer through small apertures, their vision obscured and incomplete. The publication mirrors this logic: a slim, landscape-format booklet that interleaves translucent tracing paper with standard pages, layering text and image to recreate the experience of obstructed, voyeuristic looking.
As Gilane Tawadros notes in her essay, the museum becomes a kind of peep show, where audiences are made complicit as voyeurs - witnessing only fragments, shadows and partial truths. Both document and extension of the artwork, Peep is a rare and ephemeral piece from the early career of the Turner Prize-winning artist, foregrounding questions of spectatorship, colonial display and institutional gaze.
Very good condtion: Mild soling to covers. Internally clean, bright and free from annotations. Binding secure.
