For greater than a decade, multidisciplinary artist Kandis Williams (US, b. 1985) has engaged with the politics of illustration, labor, and the physique by way of a formidable array of media, from collage and sculpture to movie and efficiency, and to writing and publishing. On April 24, 2025, the Walker Artwork Heart will open the artist’s first institutional survey, inviting audiences to attach along with her incisive and well timed follow. Titled “A Floor”, the expansive presentation will function each main our bodies of labor and lesser-known objects that will probably be proven in a museum context for the primary time. Collectively, the depth of works captures the unbelievable vary and intricacy of Williams’s follow and invitations engagement with themes and concepts which can be particularly resonant in our modern second. A Floor will stay on view on the Walker by way of August 24, 2025.
The exhibition is curated by Taylor Jasper, the Walker’s Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visible Arts, with help from Laurel Rand-Lewis, the Walker’s Curatorial Fellow in Visible Arts. A Floor is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication produced by the Walker’s design studio in shut collaboration with the artist. Providing essentially the most complete written overview of Williams’s work to-date, the publication will embody essays by Jasper in addition to Denise Ryner, the Andrea B. Laporte Curator on the Institute of Up to date Artwork Philadelphia.
All through her work, Williams positions the expertise of the physique inside histories and expressions of racism, nationalism, eroticism, and authority. Particularly, she illuminates and challenges the ways in which Black our bodies have been displaced, disciplined, dispossessed, and commodified, whereas creating area for reclamation, company, and autonomy. Inside her follow, collage serves as a crucial connective thread, permitting her to layer, fragment, and disrupt newly made and archival imagery throughout the numerous media with which she works. On this means, she is each bodily and conceptually unraveling methods of oppression and establishing new buildings and vocabularies, leveraging the facility of visible tradition to dismantle longstanding hierarchies to disclose new alternatives for the making of private and communal identification.
Williams’s distinct engagement with materials floor as a web site of motion and transformation serves because the foundational anchor of the exhibition and offers the presentation its identify. Throughout sculpture, video, set up, and works on paper, A Floor unfolds as an interrogation of visibility, energy, and the circumstances that form and self-discipline Black our bodies. Every gallery builds on Williams’s exploration of surveillance, motion, labor, and mythology, revealing how methods of oppression are inscribed on the physique and the way those self same our bodies resist, subvert, and reimagine the phrases of their existence.
The primary gallery, titled Politics of the Gaze, examines the methods Black our bodies have been made hypervisible and are judged beneath the patriarchal and racialized gaze. Right here, Williams’s two-channel video Eurydice (2017–2021) transforms the classical delusion right into a meditation on spectatorship and surveillance. Inside the work, Orpheus’s fateful backward look is reframed as an act of scrutiny and possession, implicating the viewers within the very energy dynamics Williams critiques. Collages and works on paper on this part additional discover how race, gender, and sweetness beliefs have been visually codified. Collectively, these works problem the concept of trying as a passive act, as a substitute asserting that trying can carry the potential for each violence and company.
Within the second gallery, titled Mapping Energy Via Motion, Williams considers how our bodies are organized and managed by way of choreography, spatial restriction, and social expectation. Particularly, she attracts on the histories of Black efficiency, from vernacular dance to spectacle, to show how bodily expression is formed by each particular person company and forces past an individual’s management. On the coronary heart of this gallery is the video Triadic Ballet (2021), which captures a dancer shifting inside a inflexible geometric grid. Their actions are directed by imposed spatial boundaries that evoke each the disciplinary nature of classical ballet and the broader regulation of Black our bodies. The room’s accompanying works push this core exploration additional.
In Plots of Resistance, Williams shifts her focus to the historic and modern exploitation of Black labor, tracing its enduring hyperlinks to land, agriculture, and extraction. The plantation, jail farm, and manufacturing unit emerge as interconnected websites the place Black our bodies have been pressured into financial manufacturing. The video Annexation Tango (2020) anchors this part. Within the work, Williams layers collectively footage of a dancer performing atop the agricultural fields of Virginia’s jail farms and historic imagery of enslaved laborers. The dancer’s actions mix tango, voguing, and modern dance, making seen the methods by which Black cultural expression carries the load of oppression and the chance of inventive freedom.
The ultimate gallery, titled Delusion, Media, and the Monstrous Different, unpacks how Blackness has been framed as a web site of each fascination and worry. Williams dissects the methods dominant narratives assemble Blackness as one thing to be managed, punished, or eradicated—usually by way of the language of mythology and horror. The works on this part draw on archival sources, popular culture, and historic imagery to interrogate how Black folks have been rendered monstrous throughout the white supremacist imaginary. The video Medusa (2023) reimagines the Gorgon delusion by way of a recent media lens, analyzing how Black femininity is framed as each menace and spectacle. The room’s different works discover how horror tropes have been used to justify racialized violence whereas additionally gesturing towards the methods Black artists and storytellers reclaim these photos.
Throughout these interconnected rooms, A Floor unfolds as an incisive examination of how visible tradition constructs Blackness. On the coronary heart of Williams’s follow is the notion that surfaces—whether or not paper, display, stage, or pores and skin—usually are not merely passive planes for illustration, however lively websites of energy, management, and resistance. Via acts of reducing, layering, and recombination, Williams affords a deeply researched and visually pressing meditation on the historical past and alternatives held by Black our bodies.
“Kandis Williams’s work feels particularly pressing on this second, as questions of visibility, energy, and management over the physique proceed to form our social and political landscapes. Via A Floor, we see how her follow not solely critiques these buildings however actively works to unravel and reconfigure them. Her method—melding historic analysis with modern media, motion, and collage—makes clear that these forces usually are not summary; they’re lived, embodied, and deeply felt,” mentioned Jasper. “At a time when the policing of our bodies, narratives, and histories is intensifying, Williams’s work affords a crucial area for reflection, resistance, and reimagination. This exhibition is a chance to have interaction with an artist whose follow challenges us to see with extra complexity and to acknowledge the stakes of what stays seen, what’s erased, and what may be made anew.”
at Walker Artwork Heart, Minneapolis
till August 24, 2025
