Candice Breitz: Whiteface

From June 15, 2022, the Museum Folkwang will be presenting the latest video work by Candice Breitz. In addition to the video installation Whiteface, which celebrates international premiere, the exhibition with the identical title features seven single-channel videos entitled White Mantras, as well as a series of photographic portraits of the characters from Whiteface. In her current cycle of works, Candice Breitz critically examines whiteness. The exhibition is on view until August 21.

Over recent years, Breitz has collected and archived a wide range of found footage fragments that document “white people talking about race.”  Her archive includes the voices of prominent political figures, news anchors and talk show hosts, as well as those of lesser known and anonymous YouTube bloggers, covering white perspectives that run the gamut from neo-Nazi ideology and far right propaganda to everyday racism and the posturing of “good white people.” “Specifically,” Breitz says, “the archive observes the rising anxiety of white people as long-standing calls to dismantle white supremacy proliferate and intensify across the globe. As such, it offers insight into the ongoing backlash against anti-racist movements, as white people struggle to come to terms with public discourse that highlights phenomena such as ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ ‘white rage’ and ‘white guilt.’”

In Whiteface, Breitz appropriates and ventriloquizes dozens of voices drawn from this archive, channelling them through her own white body. Wearing nothing but a white dress shirt and zombie contact lenses, the artist conjures up whiteness in a variety of its guises, rotating through a series of cheap blonde wigs as the work unfolds, among which her own platinum head of hair is featured. Breitz’s un-wigged appearance among the characters that populate the piece, serves to acknowledge the artist’s own embeddedness in whiteness. Yet, while Breitz and many of the disembodied voices that she lip-syncs may be recognisable in Whiteface (Tucker Carlson, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Maher, Richard Spencer and Robin DiAngelo all make vocal cameos), specific white folks are not the primary target of this stinging satire. Rather, it is the condition of whiteness that Breitz seeks to prod into visibility. Dislocated from the white people who originally uttered them, the words that stream through Breitz accumulate to provide a scathing study of the
vocabulary and grammar underlying this condition, a critical survey of the language via which whiteness frames, normalises and leverages its power.

Breitz’s deliberately theatrical performance in Whiteface draws attention to the constructed nature of whiteness and other racial categories. Her bleached presence and deadened eyes locate the fictions that naturalise and perpetuate white supremacy squarely within the genre of horror.

Born and raised in South Africa during the era of apartheid, Breitz has consistently sought to grapple with whiteness in her work, from early photographic series such as “Ghost Series” (1994), to later installations such as Extra (2011) and TLDR (2017). Whiteface represents her most direct stab at autoethnography yet.

Press conference: Tuesday, June 14, 11am
Opening: Tuesday, June 14, 6–10pm