Studio Visit: Sonya Dyer, Delfina Foundation Platform (feature)

PUBLISHED Dec 2020

Artist and writer Sonya Dyer has, over several years, developed a rigorous research-led practice centred on adopting speculative and science fiction as critical lenses to explore Black female subjectivities. Working mainly in moving image, text, sculpture and performance, she posits alternative narratives of hope and survival, adopting an approach Amelia Barikin describes in the anthology of collected essay Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction as “working through overlaps between fiction and non-fiction, the real and the imagined, so that science fiction is here valued for its capacity to construct alternate realities out of the very stuff from which the present is made.”[1] Broadly speaking, Dyer is interested in considering how fiction handles the future so as to challenge the traditional hierarchical binaries of science which throughout history, has left Black women vulnerable to systemic exploitation.