feature: biracial kenyan artist phoebe boswell uses racist tinder flirtations for artistic look at race and sex

A biracial Kenyan woman named Phoebe Boswell is turning race-based flirtations she encounters while Tinder’ing her local, and very white city of Gothenburg, Sweden. If you’re a woman of color who, like Boswell and myself, has trolled through online/app dating before, you’ve probably/definitely encountered some questionable interactions with white men and non-black MOC. Be it through microaggressions via fetishization in the form of curiosity and experimentation and flat-out racism. “The first [message] I got was a guy who said, “Heyyyy. I was recently in Botswana on safari, and you remind me so much of it. Lion. Queen of the Jungle. Roar,” Boswell told The Root. Boswell used these experiences and her perspective on apps like Tinder as the thesis for her installation ‘Stranger In The Village, which was on recently on display at 156 Art Fair’s annual African art exhibition at Pioneer Works. The project gets it’s namesake from an essay of the same name by James Baldwin which explores the otherization of the black man in the context of white Europe. Check out images from ‘Stranger In The Village’ down below and let us know what you think.

See ‘Stranger In The Village’ in its entirety, over here.
www.phoebeboswell.com

*Erin White is an Atlanta-based writer and AFROPUNK’s editorial and social media assistant. You can follow her on Tumblr or friend her on Facebook. Have a pitch or an inquiry? Shoot her an email at erin@afropunk.com.