Sonia Boyce and Yeu-Lai Mo

Licked is an exhibition of video, photography, sound and texts grappling with the promise and disappointments, of multiculturalism in Britain. Sonia Boyce and Yeu-Lai Mo use the mouth as a metaphor for exchange between the foreign and the familiar. The artists explore the way racial identities are manipulated and sterotyped for questionable purposes. Their works give a fresh, historically informed and open-ended point of view about the exciting and ever-changing mixture of different cultures in contemporary Britain.

Sonia Boyce presents a performance of three choirs of different nationalities. Elusive and unseen, they sing in separate areas of Gasworks studios and Gallery. Multi-lingual voices permeate the building without coming from an identifiable source, asking the viewer to question cultural identity in relation to language and physicality. Exploring prejudices in a different way, food and the hidden world of the chinese takeaway inspires Yeu-Lai Mo. Her witty and incisive new digital images, food tanks and video work look at the way Western culture has borrowed an homogenised food, and identities from around the world.

Sonia Boyce and Yeu-Lai Mo