Kandis Williams

A dystopian world filled with polar opposites seeks to find harmony through common threads.

Annexation Tango was produced as a site-responsive commission for the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. The video’s backdrops feature fields that were formerly those of the Lorton Reformatory and the Virginia State Prison Farm, two facilities where incarcerated people were made to work as a condition of their sentences. Aerial footage of prison facilities, plantation-style homes, open fields, and pastures superimposed with a dancer performing a tango for one provide an uncanny convergence of past and present architectures of oppression.

Kandis Williams based the structure of her video Death of A on Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. Composed of two acts and a requiem, Miller’s tragedy follows Willy Loman, the titular salesman in a morality play about the so-called American Dream and the dissatisfactions of capitalism. Instead of simply using Miller’s language, Williams collaged a script that also includes texts by Albert Einstein, Saidiya Hartman, Yvonne Rainer, and others. A single actor performs passages from the script as imagery from pop, political, and journalistic sources appears. Williams’s Loman character appears as both actor and dancer, accentuating the emphasis placed on the monologue and solo in theater and dance, respectively. She has reflected, “the work reconfigures the historical record to reflect the unnamable narratives of the psyche, emphasizing the Black body as a site of experience at the same time that it is coopted as a politicized symbol by the spectator.”