her solo show “Whiteface,” white South African artist Candice Breitz brought together many examples of what’s been dubbed “white fragility,” a range of emotional defense mechanisms that deny the reality of the harmful consequences of whiteness. Among the works on view was Extra, 2011, which consists of a one-channel video installation—arranged in a kind of living-room setting—and a group of photographs. On a movie set, an extra is an actor whose job is to fill in the background of a scene. In making the video, Breitz herself became an extra in the popular South African soap opera Generations, which features a predominantly Black cast. The series, produced by Black writer Mfundi Vundla, was broadcast for the first time in 1994, thus marking the political and social changes that followed the first democratic elections in South Africa. Like an alien body invisible to the other characters, Breitz appears ghostlike in various scenes of Generations, a symbol of the ways in which white people conceal their privileges and stoke fears of their disappearance in the postapartheid society.
Whiteface, 2022, is also the title of Breitz’s most recent video installation. As in an echo chamber, her video amplifies the defensive reflexes white people mount against acknowledging the effects of structural racism. In rapid succession, we hear short audio clips of disturbing statements from the media and social networks. We hear the voices of TV personalities, such as Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson, preacher and broadcaster Pat Robertson, British-based American writer Lionel Shriver, and Canadian alt-right YouTuber Lauren Southern. These voices obscure the advantages of white privilege by casting them as solely rooted in individual achievement. For example, O’Reilly, the former lead anchor of Fox News, insists, “Look, you and I are lucky guys. We made it. We worked hard.” We hear whites described as victims of “reverse racism” and even as targets of a planned genocide. Interrupting these views that reinforce each other are countervoices, such as those of Cenk Uygur, cofounder and lead anchor of the web-based left-wing news talk show The Young Turks, and writer Robin DiAngelo, who popularized the phrase “white fragility” and who asks, “What does it mean to be white?”
We don’t see any of these characters, however. Instead, the thirty-five-minute video shows the artist lip-synching all the different voices. She takes on different personae, but they resemble each other. Each character wears a white shirt and grayish opaque contact lenses that render their gaze zombielike. Only their hairdos differ. In the glaring studio light that levels all contours of the space, Breitz mouths the sound bites and adapts her facial expressions and gestures to the successive statements whose recurring phrases and exclamations determine the video’s beat and rhythmic refrains.
In a separate group of films, all titled White Mantras, 2022, Breitz has turned some of these voices mouthing racist dogmas into short loops. Each of the seven videos shows a different character speaking and was presented in its own room. The polarizing worldviews thus eerily expanded into the depths of the exhibition space—like whiteness itself, which regards itself as invisible and colorless, yet is omnipresent. In all these works, Breitz develops her practice of a “critical whiteness” through an aesthetic of the uncanny and grotesque.
— Gürsoy Doğtaș