HFBK

Artist Talk: Video and Performance Practices of Kandis Williams

Kandis Williams is an artist, writer, and social choreographer whose work spans performance, collage, and moving image to examine how bodies are read within colonial, racial, and gendered regimes of representation. Recent projects—including, Eurydice (2020), Death of A (whitney biennial 2022), A Garden (art basel miami 2021), A Line (David Zwirner 2021), A Field (VCU 2020), and A/The (Heidi Gallery 2023). Drawing on Black feminist and abolitionist thought, Williams stages lecture-performances and installations that braid research with studio practice, using movement, voice, and text to propose counter-archives and new forms of study.

How the series resonates Monster, Minor, Margin: Performance as Study curated by Kandis Williams with the Extended Library
The Extended Library treats performance as a form of knowledge production—an embodied practice that translates lived experience into public study. This series explores how Black performers stage negotiations between identity, humor, sonic experimentation, various audience recognitions including negotiating sterreotyping. These negotiations are additionally made in spaces that have very different demands of the performer from independent, theatre, film and commercial spaces. With Thelma Buabeng’s comedic/cabaret solo performance (Tell Me Nothing From The Horse) and Tapiwa Svosve’s concert-lecture with guest collaborator Tobechukwu Onwukeme (Forensic Architecture), exploring through-lines of frequencies in Black radical sound, the program opens a window into how performance formats create and contest meaning. Both practices show how performance operates as critique, pedagogy, and archive at once. These events resonate directly with my concurrent seminar, Monster, Minor, Margin: Black Body / Being / Performance in Archive and Media, which examines the circulation and contestation of highly aestheticized Black figures in culture.