Deborah-Joyce Holman

Born in Basel, 1991.
Lives and works in Basel and London.

Deborah Joyce Holman is a multidisciplinary artist whose work sits in the tensions between the value and dangers of visibility and representation. Holman is interested in strategies of refusal, which include opacity, illegibility and absence as Black and queer counter-hegemonic stances. They explore these themes through a variety of media, including text, image-making, moving image, sculpture and installation, led by their research of popular contemporary and archival visual cultures.

Holman has recently shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2022); Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris (2022), Kunstverein Last Tango, Zurich (2022), Unfinished Live, The Shed, New York City & House of Electronic Arts, Basel (2021) and the 7th Athens Biennial (2021), amongst others. In 2021, she was nominated for the Kiefer Hablitzel Göhner Prize.

Forthcoming scheduled exhibitions include schwarzescafé, Luma Westbau, Zurich, Sentiment, Zurich, Istituto Svizzero, Palermo, and KEUR, Paris.

As part of her curatorial practice, she worked as Associate Director (2020–2021) and as Associate Curator (2021–2022) at East London arts organisation Auto Italia. She is the founding director of 1.1, a platform for early-career practitioners in arts, music and text-based practices, with an exhibition space in Basel, which ran 2015 – 2020. Holman has curated the 2018 and 2019 annual group exhibitions for Les Urbaines, Lausanne.               

Deborah Joyce Holman obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from Haute Ecole des Arts et Design of Geneva (HEAD) in 2018. In 2019-2020 she participated in the CAMPUS independent study programme at Nottingham Contemporary.