“Are you looking forward to Sonia Boyce’s show inside the British pavilion?” asks an independent curator as we wait for a flight to Venice to catch the festival of contemporary art known as the Biennale. “I’ll be surprised if it’s anything other than really boring.”

In the event, his pessimism proves too harsh. But I’d be lying if I said that Feeling Her Way, the new installation by Boyce, who’s representing her country at the city’s 59th International Art Exhibition (the first female black artist to do so), was truly exciting.

The show derives from an ongoing project that has long preoccupied Boyce, who was born in 1962, and grew up in the East End of London before emerging in the Eighties as part of the black British art movement. (Some of her early figurative feminist pictures appeared recently in Tate Britain’s engrossing Life Between Islands exhibition.)

After her work changed direction during the Nineties, when she started collaborating with others and producing installations, she initiated, in 1999, her “Devotional Collection”, which amasses material such as vinyl, CDs, and memorabilia associated with black British female musicians stretching back to the 19th century. The collection currently honours more than 350 women.

For her new installation, which will travel to Margate next year, Boyce invited five black female musicians – ranging from established names, such as Tanita Tikaram (known for her 1988 hit, Good Tradition), to emerging talents (eg, Poppy Ajudha) – to improvise together, under the guidance of the British composer Errollyn Wallen, in a recording session held last year at Abbey Road Studios. That session was filmed, along with subsequent ones with each soloist later the same day – and, from the footage, Boyce produced a series of short videos, each concentrating on an individual singer, which are arranged within five of the pavilion’s six day-lit rooms.