A Method
Known for a versatile practice that spans collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, pedagogy, and publishing, Kandis Williams’ work uses collage as a tool of Black feminist resistance.
In the run up to her first museum survey at the Walker, curator Taylor Jasper explores Williams’ deeply researched practice and its emerging visions of liberation.
Over the last decade, Kandis Williams’s multidisciplinary practice has been marked by a persistent engagement with the politics of representation, labor, and the body. Her work challenges us to consider and reconsider the ways in which Black bodies have been dispossessed, displaced, disciplined, and commodified throughout history, while also offering visual counternarratives that reclaim agency and autonomy. Across video, film, sculpture, installation, and works on paper, Williams interrogates the power dynamics that shape our perceptions of race and identity. Her distinct collage method challenges monolithic visual culture to reconcile histories of erasure, oppression, and colonization.
Collage is the conceptual connective tissue throughout
Williams’s oeuvre, functioning as both technique and method.
In her works, the surface as a physical and a conceptual space acts as a site for unraveling systems of dominance, subordination, oppression, and disenfranchisement. Engaging with the surface as more than just a plane for imagery, she uses collage to layer, disrupt, and fragment, visually representing the dismantling of oppressive structures. The acts of cutting, pasting, and reassembling become symbolic of dissecting entrenched ideologies and power dynamics, revealing the hidden mechanisms that sustain them. In this way, the surface becomes a charged space of critique, where the complexities of social hierarchies are exposed, questioned, and reframed.
By reframing the visual archive as both a tool and a site of resistance, collage reveals the dynamic interplay between story-telling, history, and pedagogy to demonstrate how meaningful ruptures to a uniform visual code are also crucial opportunities for innovation, transformation, and even revolution. Williams’s collages examine the power and privilege that art history, mass media, the archive, and constructions of identity hold, and counternarrative is a useful lens to understand the types of critiques they engender.
Arising from the vantage point of those who have been historically marginalized, counter-narratives serve to critique dominant knowledge and linear temporality to instead visualize other models for recounting history outside of both temporal and spatial norms. In doing so, counternarratives become a way of displacing and moving aside what has been deemed the ideological “center,” such as the Western canon of art history. Questioning and reconstructing these popular notions, counternarratives shift this “center” as a form of resistance against traditional modes of domination to situate radical imaginings in their histories.
They fill a need for stories that match one’s own experiences of self, particularly those that are at odds with socially constrained dominant narratives.1
Collage challenges qualities of aesthetic realism through the fragmentation, layering, and juxtaposition of disparate images and mediums, and thus the reading of a collage requires an expansive perspective that understands the artwork to be, fundamentally, a dialogue. Because the materials of a collage are often distinct and diverse, this multidisciplinary approach introduces new forms of engagement with images, ideas, and objects that have been included or contextualized within the art historical canon. Collage therefore introduces a whole new array of material and conceptual considerations both within and outside of the context of art. In the case of Williams’s practice, psychological, sociological, and political perspectives informed by critical theory, postcolonial theory, and intersectional Black feminist theory are foundational, speaking to a similarly fragmented and nonlinear understanding of identity and relations that collage has the demonstrated capacity to illustrate.
Though collage has a continuous history from the early twentieth century on, Williams is drawn to generative moments when the medium was used to disrupt linear narratives, fragment dominant ideologies, and articulate new political or social possibilities. From the Eurocentric perspective that has largely dominated the history of collage, Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism are acknowledged as the three modernist movements that challenged the status quo of art making. Artists such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century, and Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann in Germany in the 1920s used collage and photomontage to address social conditions as subject matter. These movements continue be regarded as vital forces in contemporary culture that helped catalyze modernist tendencies, opening up new ways of seeing and understanding contemporary life from the early twentieth century onward.
At the same time in North America, artists throughout the Harlem Renaissance adopted the form and sensibilities of collage to articulate national Black cultural identity and international modernism. Through this, they demonstrated how analogies, juxtapositions, and other aesthetic frictions have historical and political implications.2
By merging African traditions with Western modernist techniques, these artists used collage to visually assert Black identity and agency in the face of systemic racism and exclusion. The layered, fragmented nature of collage allowed them to break from traditional linear modes of representation, creating a space for multiple narratives to coexist and to challenge dominant ideologies. Figures like Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, and Faith Ringgold deployed collage’s disjunctive elements to symbolize the complexities of Black life, weaving together cultural memory, diasporic heritage, and contemporary experience. In doing so, they engaged in a form of visual activism, reimagining Black histories and futures in ways that contested racialized narratives and situated Black art within the broader currents of global modernism. The medium became not only a formal innovation but a vital tool in the fight for cultural and political recognition.
With two world wars and an ongoing civil rights fight for freedom, the impulse that drove the creation of collage as a combinatory technique arrived through multiple points of entry into a hybrid and multiracial world. Over the course of the twentieth century, artists turned to collage for its capacity to address personal, social, and political experiences and critiques at once. In this context, collage offered new opportunities for uncovering relationships, oppositions, transitions, and intersections of social reality, using tangible materials of that reality as the instruments for critique.
Williams’s engagement with collage as a critical practice reflects her deep interest in how fragmented images and texts can disassemble entrenched power structures, especially those related to race, gender, and representation. For her, collage is not merely a technique but a radical form of reassembly—a way to present complex, layered truths that challenge the viewer’s perception of reality.
Her work often incorporates found images, historical references, and the body itself to create densely layered compositions that evoke histories of oppression while simultaneously imagining liberatory futures. In doing so, she taps into the medium’s capacity for resistance and renewal, making it a powerful means for examining the present through the lens of past disruptions and future potentials.
As a pedagogical tool and a strategy of resistance, collage is unprecedented as a medium. It is directly informed by the very politics and oppressive social structures that underlie many of the most popular distributions of media on a widespread scale. The radical act of cutting up these material objects and the ideas they represent reinstates the artist with a degree of agency over cultural narratives, creating the space for critique and setting the record “straight” through purposeful juxtaposition. By employing and updating methodologies presented by Dada, Surrealist, Cubist, and Harlem Renaissance artists, and beyond, Williams builds on an ever-expanding definition of collage that goes beyond critique and instead folds in the radical implications of counternarratives to restructure cultural narratives, challenge the inherent supremacy of the archive, and mend perceived gaps in cultural knowledge.
Williams’s practice is intricately woven with critical theories of race, gender, and power, drawing from a range of intellectual traditions, particularly the writings of Michel Foucault, Hortense J. Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Cheryl I. Harris, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics—the idea that power extends into the control of bodies and populations—is a crucial framework for understanding Williams’s exploration of how Black bodies have been regulated, policed and surveilled throughout history.3
She directly engages with the ways in which state violence and systemic racism manifest in the lived experiences of Black individuals, confronting the viewer with the realities of carceral logic, surveillance, and the commodification of labor. Triadic Ballet (2021), for example, delves into the intersections of choreography, power, and systemic control, drawing an analogy between the structuring of bodies in dance and the physical discipline found in
systems of political oppression, such as prisons and military
institutions.
Though Williams’s work references Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic 1922 dance piece of the same name, she does not attempt to replicate it. Instead, she recontextualizes the original within a contemporary framework that critiques how Black bodies, in particular, have been subjected to regimentation and exploitation throughout history. In this work, Williams interrogates how choreography mirrors societal methods of organizing and controlling bodies, even in spaces that appear to celebrate self-expression, such as dance.
Triadic Ballet features a single woman dancing atop a black floor marked with a white square segmented into six triangles, which both guide and restrict her movements. The geometry of the floor, with its strict divisions, serves on the one hand as a formal device through which Williams explores the tensions between freedom and constraint in movement and on the other hand as a metaphor for the external forces—societal, racial, and institutional—that seek to confine and shape Black bodies. Acting as both choreographer and visual artist, Williams constructed the visual space and dictated the dancer’s movements through the imposed structure of geometric shapes.
This juxtaposition between the rigid precision of the geometric environment and the expressive potential of dance not only reflects a deeper tension between autonomy and control but also underscores how Black performers, historically subjected to the scrutiny of audiences and institutions, evoke broader histories of surveillance, racialized violence, and systemic oppression, whereby Black bodies have been policed and regulated in both public and private spaces alike. Yet even within these constraints, the dancer’s movements carry a potential for resistance and liberation. Williams complicates the narrative of subjugation, illustrating how, within repressive structures, Black bodies can carve out spaces for survival, self-expression, and resilience, challenging viewers to consider how these dynamics of control persist across various contexts.
In creating Triadic Ballet and its accompanying collages, Williams worked intimately with Black dancers in her studio to develop a choreography that interrogated the intersections of form, body, and identity. Bringing the dancers into a collaborative space, Williams initiated conversations around the shapes and forms their bodies naturally assumed, as well as the dance techniques they were versed in. These discussions revealed the complex dynamics Black dancers often face within the dance world, where certain phenotypic traits are seen as predisposing them to specific roles or positions.
Together, they explored how these dancers’ bodies navigate particular attitudes and techniques, considering how each movement felt to them physically and the implications of embodying these forms.4 Williams was intentional in choreographing movements that challenged stereotypical notions about the Black body, while also celebrating its versatility and strength. She constructed sequences in which each dancer’s movements were a precise, deliberate set of actions that began, transformed, and concluded in a smooth arc.
Her choreography drew from a wide array of vernacular dance styles, blending forms such as elements of the Native American Buffalo Dance with jazz motifs. Drawing on the training of her lead dancer Natasha Diamond-Walker, Williams created a hybrid choreography that is both concise and layered, collapsing historical and contemporary dance traditions. In this way, Williams not only highlighted the specificity and adaptability of Black dancers but also offered a commentary on the broader conversations within dance about race, body politics, and movement as a form of resistance. Behind the dancer, a screen displays a series of contrasting clips, including footage of the Nicholas Brothers’ energetic tap dancing from the 1940s, a military parade, Janet Jackson’s iconic “Rhythm Nation” video of 1989, and the notorious 1991 footage of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King. Williams’s juxtaposition of these visuals suggests that dancing bodies — particularly those of Black performers — are subject to the same controlling forces as bodies in other repressive contexts.
Choreography, like other systems of control, dictates how and where dancers move, rendering their movements subject to external forces, even as they appear fluid and free in the final performance.
The collages related to Triadic Ballet further develop Williams’s critique, illustrating how choreography and dis- cipline are intertwined in visual form. In A Lift and a Kick conflated (2021), cutouts of dancers from magazines, dance books, and her own studio photography are arranged to create clusters that overlap yet remain carefully orchestrated. There Are Two Sides to Every Line (2021) features images of Martha Graham, known for appropriating movements from Black dance traditions.
By including Graham in this context, Williams highlights the long history of cultural appropriation within dance, suggesting that the extraction of creativity from marginalized bodies is another form of exploitation. Graham’s incorporation of Black dance gestures becomes, in Williams’s work, a metaphor for how Black culture, born from suffering and oppression, is often absorbed and commodified by the culture industry, much like the Nicholas Brothers’ performances were repackaged in Hollywood or how the militaristic drills of “Rhythm Nation” found a home in mainstream media.
Racial and gendered representation is also a focus of Williams’s critique, central to which are the writings of Spillers and Wynter, both of whom examine how Black bodies are rendered through colonial and patriarchal systems of power. Spillers’s seminal essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987) introduced the concept of “ungendering,” a key theoretical underpinning in Williams’s exploration of how Black femininity is both hyper-visible and erased within cultural production.5. Spillers argues that the violent history of slavery fundamentally disrupted the gendered categories imposed on Black people, specifically Black women, rendering their bodies sites of objectification and control outside traditional gendered frameworks. Williams’s work engages directly with this idea by creating collages that destabilize the viewer’s understanding of gender, race, and power. For example, Esophagus Pin-Up (2016) uses disjointed images of bodies, focusing specifically on the esophagus and throat, areas symbolically tied to voice, consumption, and control.
The throat, as a vulnerable part of the body, becomes a metaphor for how women’s voices and persons have been historically silenced, manipulated, and consumed by dominant cultural forces. In drawing attention to this part of the body, Williams highlights the ways in which women have had to navigate systems of power that seek to control their voices and their bodies, while also resisting and reclaiming space for their own agency.
The term pin-up in the title evokes the hypersexualized, commodified image of women, yet Williams subverts this by presenting fragmented, unsettling imagery that resists the smooth, desirable surfaces of traditional pin-up iconography and the mirrored plexiglass on which the work is situated. Instead of glamour or seduction, there is a sense of distortion and dread in the work, which underscores the violence inherent in the historical objectification of women. By juxtaposing imagery of the female form with anatomical elements, Williams explores the body not only as a site of desire but as a locus of trauma, control, and rebellion.
The fragmentation in Williams’s work is not merely aesthetic but speaks to the historical fragmentation of identity itself, particularly within Black experiences. Wynter’s challenge to Western conceptions of “Man” as a universal subject, most notably articulated in her 2003 essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation,” resonates throughout Williams’s oeuvre.6
Wynter critiques the ways in which Enlightenment-era humanism constructed a normative, white, male subject, relegating Black and Indigenous peoples to the margins of humanity. Williams disrupts this narrative by presenting alternative histories and counternarratives that make visible the lives and bodies erased by colonial and Eurocentric histories. Because most colonial and institutional archives are created by (and serve the purposes and biases of) white people in power, it becomes crucial to expand the possibilities of what an archive can be and seek alternative representations that rewrite or expand on the dominant narrative of history.
As a passageway to understanding the past, the archival process has a distinct social and political impact that must be reclaimed, diversified, and decolonized to reflect cultural, rather than institutional, values and hold space for untold stories and coun-ternarratives. Collage provides an opportunity to produce and manipulate cultural or domestic archives that are community- bound and exist in conscious opposition to traditional hierarchies embedded in institutional archives. Williams’s work not only critiques these dominant narratives but also reclaims agency, suggesting that Black bodies are not simply subjects of violence but also sites of resistance and resilience.
Harris’s theory of whiteness as property and Ferreira da Silva’s critique of global raciality further contextualize Williams’s interrogation of labor, value, and the circulation of racialized images. Harris argues that the legal and social construction of whiteness operates as a form of property, conferring power and privilege that are protected and maintained through systemic racism.7 Williams’s Atomic Karen (2021) is a visual exploration of the mechanisms that maintain inequality, layered with the artist’s signature cultural critique.
The collage explores the fraught history of white female entitlement, epitomized by the “Karen” stereotype — a shorthand for women who use their privilege to police or control marginalized groups, often in public spaces.
The title itself fuses two powerful forces: the “Karen” archetype and the atomic bomb, symbolizing destructive, unchecked power. Williams assembles fragments of images — portraits, historical references, and abstract forms — into a disorienting yet coherent whole, creating a sense of dissonance. Through this juxtaposition, she critiques how systemic structures of whiteness can act as an overwhelming force, often unseen but omnipresent, with far-reaching consequences. Atomic Karen invites viewers to confront their own complicity in societal hierarchies, encouraging critical reflection on the roles individuals play within broader systems of power.
This framework is also evident in Williams’s critique of labor, notably in works like A Field (2020), where she investigates the legacy of plantation capitalism and how it continues to shape modern structures of labor and production, particularly for Black and marginalized communities. The exploitation of Black labor is not just historical but remains deeply embedded in contemporary systems of capital, an idea that Williams unpacks by highlighting the ways in which Black labor is commodified, surveilled, and devalued in a capitalist society. Ferreira da Silva’s focus on how raciality shapes global power dynamics is similarly crucial to understanding Williams’s broader critique of systemic racism. Particularly in Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Ferreira da Silva examines how racial distinctions underpin the global order, perpetuating inequality and exclusion on a structural level.8
Williams engages with these ideas by questioning the global circulation of images of Blackness and the ways in which these images reinforce racial hierarchies and control. While critiquing these power structures she also offers a space for reimagining alternative futures, where Black bodies are no longer confined to the margins of representation but are central to the creation of new narratives and histories. Her work is a powerful assertion that another world is possible, one in which the histories of oppression and erasure are reconciled.
Our contemporary moment is defined by irony, fragmentation, and an increasing awareness that late capitalism is doomed and many of the things deemed valuable must be reoriented toward another future. Such a recognition may be traced back to the idea that parts of the world could be senselessly severed at the seams four hundred years ago with the Atlantic slave trade and the colonial conquests of domination by figures such as Christopher Columbus.
This unforgettable history — and foundation — of violence must never be forgot- ten as the present moves forward. And yet these histories have been rewritten, specifically in the Western world, and force-fed as their own propaganda. The resulting entrenched racism and heteronormativity have been unraveled and rewritten by scholars and activists over the past few decades. The physical “cut” of collage is representative of a larger condition of rupture that is deeply rooted in intersectional Black feminist practices of dismantling patriarchal index and authority within the history of social movements. This opens up an entirely new network of thinking and engagement with visual culture at large, but specifically recent developments such as the spread of alternative information.
This way of thinking is akin to the process of collage as a method that is accessible by virtue of all that it encompasses. Geared toward impulses to retell history, reframe identity, or otherwise reorient perspectives on the present and future, Williams's practice involves plumbing the flood of images and cultural objects found in Western culture to question the narratives they come to represent. Creating something new out of these images that have been shaped by a multitude of forces and structures becomes profoundly political in the matter of cut and paste, as the artist takes back agency over how she would like to assemble and represent reality, often in ways that are antithetical to the original intent.
Williams’s visual explorations document contemporary experience through cultural materials such as magazines, photographs, newspapers, maps, and other objects representative of Western sociopolitical zeitgeists. Working among different temporal moments, the artist likens the method of collage to archival work, collecting images from print and digital media that develop counternarratives to an overwhelmingly white and colonial archive.
Venus is a Sacrificial Form (2016) reimagines the figure of Venus, traditionally depicted as a symbol of idealized beauty and femininity in Western art, by confronting the violent history of objectification and exploitation embedded within such portrayals. The title evokes both reverence and subjugation, positioning the goddess as not merely a symbol of beauty but also a figure sacrificed to the societal ideals she has come to represent.
The work weaves together a provocative array of images: the prehistoric Venus of Willendorf, the iconic American sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, a young Blue Ivy Carter, and pop idol Britney Spears. By juxtaposing these figures, Williams critiques how female bodies, across history and cultures, are objectified, fetishized, and manipulated by societal forces. The Venus of Willendorf, an ancient fertility figure, represents idealized femininity tied to nature and reproduction, while Marilyn Monroe symbolizes the twentieth- century commodification of the female form, her image perpetually consumed by the male gaze.
Inserting Blue Ivy Carter — a young Black girl often subjected to the public's gaze — into this lineage of female icons, Williams highlights the ways in which even the bodies of Black children are scrutinized, policed, and commodified by a racialized media. The inclu- sion of Britney Spears at her most vulnerable moment, bald and in the throes of a public mental health crisis, underscores the ways women’s autonomy is attacked when they reject or fail to conform to prescribed roles of beauty, desirability, or submissiveness.
This mashup of figures, spanning from prehistory fail to conform to prescribed roles of beauty, desirability, or submissiveness. This mashup of figures, spanning from prehistory to contemporary pop culture, creates a layered critique of the ongoing ways female bodies are exploited, dissected, and controlled across time, drawing attention to how cultural myths of femininity and womanhood serve to uphold broader structures of power. By fragmenting and reassembling the body, Williams disrupts the traditional gaze that has long confined women, especially Black women, to limiting and often harmful narratives.
As both a refraction and a critique of the print industry and the social structures that define it, collage for Williams is a distinct space where characters and elements from different places of origin can gather in the timelessness of the present. In this way, the method of collage reorients how historical time and archival practices operate to complicate and critique what an archive can represent. Importantly, the production of a counternarrative makes way for the development of counter-archives.
Looking both within a colonial archive and outside of it, Williams unearths representations of Blackness while holding space for the irony and tensions of being conspicuously unseen by art history and dominant media outside of appropriation and tokenization. Such strategic readings of the archive produce counternarratives that readjust the understanding of the colonial past as unrepresentative of the oppressed and unarchived, and carve out distinct space to acknowledge these histories on their own terms.
Of Black archival practices, art writer Maandeeq Mohamed states, “We know that the archive will never be sufficient — if we are accounted for, it is via the violence of fact: scientific racism, and catalogues listing enslaved people as property. . . . Perhaps not knowing can be useful, insofar as it allows for a recognition of the fact that what is/isn’t archived is but one of many fictions . . . that constitute blackness in public life.”9
Williams creates connections, interpretations, and counternarratives that make sense of her worldview while paying homage to the sublime multiplicity and vast silences of the archive entangled with the unforgettable histories of racism and colonialism that inform the material culture left behind for future generations.
The theoretical anchors for this analysis are deeply indebted to Black, feminist, Indigenous, and BIPOC discourse, scholarship, and embodied work that advocates for the disruption of hegemony to create space for artists and practices to speak out against violence, exclusion, and tokenism. There are many nuances, vulnerabilities, and possibilities in these perspectives that must be explored and nurtured with care and consideration of what remains left unsaid.
These issues map onto Williams’s work in ways that are informed by what motivates her to employ collage as a counternarrative and reparative device. The fragmentation of experience illustrated in Williams’s work is a direct result of the actions and decisions made by the wants of those who represent European colonialism, American hegemony, and Western capitalism, who have no consideration for the people whose lives are disproportionality affected by their destructive choices.
It is not hyperbolic to state that capitalism and corporate greed have ravaged the natural environment to fragments while simultaneously trapping minds and lives in frustratingly repetitive spaces and cycles.
Critical theorist Sara Ahmed offers compelling arguments for the notion of disorientation as a challenge to the underpinnings of white supremacy and heteronormativity entrenched in Western culture. As a tool in the construction of counternarratives, disorientation is a strategy that Ahmed reflects on, particularly in the context of the work of Frantz Fanon, explaining, “From Fanon we learn about the experience of disorientation, as the experience of being an object among other objects, of being shattered, of being cut into pieces by the hostility of the white gaze.”10
Shifting how objects are gathered, this sense of disorientation speaks to the process of collage as a deliberate disturbance of a particular established order in pursuit of other relations. Elaborating on this, Ahmed posits a “queer phenomenology [that] would function as a disorientation device; it would not overcome the ‘disalignment’ of the horizontal and vertical axes, allowing the oblique to open up another angle on the world.”11
This choice not to overcome disorientation but to revel in the familiar as it becomes strange is a worthwhile point of consideration. The overlay of several narratives at once speaks to the inherent multiplicity of counternarratives, and the embrace of disorientation becomes a guiding light for visual analysis. Reading memories and lineages in relation to one another, Williams’s works create a space that welcomes the dedicated act of slow looking. The series gods and monsters that white people make up to kill us all (2024), for example, invites deep contemplation of its densely layered imagery.
The series draws from a wide array of archival, filmic, and pop cultural sources, weaving together fragments of history, myth, and media into complex visual narratives. Williams turns her gaze toward horror motifs — monsters, ghosts, and haunted figures — examining them as products of the white supremacist cultural imaginary. She posits that these creatures of horror are not merely fictional figures but manifestations of white anxieties and fears, serving as metaphors for the brutal realities of racial colonialism, violence, genocide, and class warfare.
The series critiques how whiteness invents its own “monsters” to justify and perpetuate its dominance, all while inflicting real horrors upon racialized bodies and communities. The slow looking that Williams encourages reveals not only the deep-seated horrors embedded in these images but also the ways in which the cultural narratives of horror serve as coping mechanisms for white perpetrators of violence.
As realities converge from fragments, Williams’s collages unfold into masterful critiques of historical chronologies and contemporary pop culture at once. The art of imagining beyond, and toward other futures, through the framework of narrative-based mythologies can be read as a resistance to a prevailing historical record that has been used as a tool to subjugate, erase, and control communities for centuries.
Williams’s two-channel film Eurydice (2017–2021) reimagines the Greek myth through a contemporary lens, focusing on themes of power, control, and the silencing of women. In the original myth, Eurydice, wife of Orpheus, dies and is condemned to the underworld. Orpheus is granted permission to retrieve her on the condition that he not look back as she follows him out of Hades. He fails, condemning Eurydice to eternal damnation.
Williams revisits this narrative, questioning the dynamics of male control and the objectification of women embedded within it. The film’s dual-channel format mirrors the fragmented nature of the myth, juxtaposing imagery drawn from the ancient tale with modern-day visuals that evoke similar themes of constraint and erasure.
One channel focuses on Eurydice as a figure trapped in a cycle of passivity and victimization, while the other provides a more fragmented, abstract perspective that disrupts her passive portrayal. By doing so, Williams creates a tension between the traditional narrative, which centers on Orpheus’s experience, and a more nuanced exploration of Eurydice’s plight as a woman whose fate is controlled by others.
The film underscores the disempowerment inherent in Eurydice’s story, while also offering a critique of the ways women’s bodies and lives are controlled in broader cultural narratives. The split screen emphasizes the multiplicity of voices and experiences that have been obscured by patriarchal storytelling. The film destabilizes the conventional gaze, inviting the audience to consider Eurydice’s story from her own perspective, one in which she is not simply a passive figure in Orpheus’s tragedy, but a woman grappling with the confines imposed on her.
Bringing these mythologies into the present is therefore significant as a future-driven historical critique that lives on in many ways. As both an act of intervention and invitation for dialogue, the process of remixing, reframing, and reconceptualizing history through collage holds distinct epistemological power in this contemporary moment. By pushing up against hegemonic sociopolitical structures represented in visual culture by mass media, material processes of fragmentation and juxtaposition become emblems of a reality rethought.
Necessarily deviant, the artist’s act of cut and paste wields agency over objects of material culture, capturing a world made up of diverse and at times incommensurable pieces that are anything but neutral. With agency and innovation, collage re-presents material culture as profoundly personal, evocative, and able to be questioned — a gesture of freedom that has been consistent since its inception. It is clear that the structures of oppression that serve as the framework for Western settler culture cannot continue to go on as they do.
Right now, the question of the future comes out of the uncertainty of our time: a sad, maddening, and just altogether bad moment. In such moments of bewildering temporality, there is an over- whelming gravitation toward other worlds, if only through a fragmented lens, that represent futures yet to fully come into view. A profound sense of hope for something better informs the ways in which material conditions of reality must be reimagined, not just conceptually, but in the shifting of actual space and narratives.
Williams’s practice is broadly geared toward impulses to retell history, reframe identity, or otherwise reorient perspectives. Resolutely turned toward history, while simultaneously engaged profoundly with the present, her work with collage is demonstrative of the necessity for any attempt at reconciling with the past to be multifaceted; otherwise it takes on the character of propaganda.
Williams’s multidisciplinary works not only acknowledge but also resist and work against traditional political economic and social hierarchies that are deeply embedded in all our institutions. Through the questioning of such historiographic, photographic, artistic, and cultural records, Williams demonstrates how the manipulation, diversification, and decolonization of archives can shift the power they hold.
As a process of retelling and recombining narratives from popular media and history, collage offers a creative way of thinking otherwise and beyond. Importantly, this serves as a crucial reminder of the ways that the past, present, and future are always in fluid conversation. A collage becomes a site of connection, distinctly grounded yet forged between places, and collaboration among both temporalities and mediums becomes an important motif.
While the actual production of collage is often a long, laborious process of collecting and then rapidly condensing through purposeful juxtaposition, it sparks a dialogue that begins with the artist through the choices they make. This can involve the types of materials at their disposal as well as their own visual language. The dialogue is continued by the viewer bringing their own references and modes of connection to the work, and thus a chain of meaning is created.
What I find beautiful about Williams’s work is the fundamental destabilization of meaning, something that art history tends to hold very dear. Built into the very nature of a collage are plurality and expansive relationality — qualities that speak to the critical theories that inform Williams's attempt to unsettle and rebuild parts of history we were brought up to forget. While there will always be resistance to engaging with the dark sides of history, the attempt to understand and potentially reconcile where the gaps, fissures, and erasures exist is crucial to moving forward into a future that is equitable and makes space for many truths, histories, and mythologies to exist at once.▪︎
Experience Kandis Williams, A Surface for yourself at the Walker from April 24 through August 24, 2025. Learn more and get tickets here.
Explore more essays and additional materials in the Kandis Williams, A Surface exhibition catalog. Available 24/7 at shop.walkerart.org/
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