WHITEFACE

What fuels racism? What does it mean to inhabit a white skin? What privileges come with whiteness? And how do public figures like television stars, comedians, and bloggers contribute to mobilizing racist resentment?

Candice Breitz, an artist who grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, is a significant voice in the ongoing discourse surrounding identity politics, racism, and whiteness. Her photographic and video works primarily scrutinize popular culture and mainstream media and their role in the construction and formation of collective and individual identities. Since the 1990s, she has thematized her own whiteness and other racialised categories in her artwork. Her works, which have been displayed in major museums and biennials worldwide for many years, captivate through their precision in observation and a distinct aesthetic. Through a serial, reductionist and deliberately arranged visual language, her video works and photographs consistently emphasize the media construction of what is presented.

In her video installation "Whiteface" (dated 2022) Breitz delves into racist clichés, speech patterns and styles of argumentation as these circulate daily in mass media, thereby creating toxic spaces of resonance and offerings of identification.

In the video, the artist herself appears, dressed in a white shirt, with and without various platinum blonde wigs. What is immediately unsettling about her multiple appearances are the slightly eerie, extreme, white contact lenses, evident even at first glance. The artist stands before a snow-white backdrop, moving her lips and gesturing like a reversed voice-dubbing artist, syncing with the voices and speech fragments of vastly different, sometimes well-known individuals. The range of this montaged re-enactment of speech fragments spans from the more or less radical, absurd, cynical disconcerting comments by white individuals about their own whiteness. These encompass the reproduction of everyday racism to white supremacist notions, to far-right propaganda. 

The spectrum of voices featured here runs the gamut from the extreme right-wing white supremacy activist Richard Spencer, to the former Fox News television presenter Tucker Carlson, whose increasingly paranoid worldview caused controversy, to the comedian Bill Maher, known for hosting the late-night talk show Politically Incorrect. It also includes the controversial activist and former African-American Studies lecturer Rachel Dolezal, who misrepresented herself as a black person despite being white and fuelled a heated discussion about the im/possibility of being “transracial”, and sociologist and anti-racism consultant Robin DiAngelo, known for coining the concept of "white fragility" and addressing systemic racism in her book "What Does It Mean to Be White?". Drawn from an archive that documents “white people talking about race,” the work includes the voices of anonymous YouTube bloggers alongside those of these more recognisable figures.”

Most recently, Breitz’s work has focused on the conditions under which empathy is produced, reflecting on a media-saturated global culture in which strong identification with fictional characters and celebrity figures runs parallel to widespread indifference to the plight of those facing real world adversity. In 2022, she completed The White Noise Trilogy, a trio of multichannel video installations that includes Love Story (2016), TLDR (2017) and Whiteface (2022).