Candice Breitz

Over recent years, Breitz, who was born and raised in South Africa during the era of apartheid, has collected an archive of moving images that documents how 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 in a satirical way. 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 bleached presence and deadened eyes locate the fictions that naturalise and perpetuate white supremacy squarely within the genre of horror. Race is a dangerous fiction that continues to exert real and violent consequences.

In her work Whiteface, Candice Breitz, born and raised in South Africa during the era of apartheid, draws from an archive that illustrates how white people grapple with the discourses around “white privilege,” “white fragility,” “white rage,” and “white guilt”. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, Breitz appropriates dozens of voices from her collection. Wearing nothing but a white dress shirt and zombie contact lenses, she locates the fictions that legitimise and perpetuate white supremacy squarely within the genre of horror.