Candice BreitzWhiteface #1, 2022
‘Candice Breitz’s ‘Whiteface’ is a two-channel video installation, first exhibited in 2022, which takes aim at the performance of whiteness in contemporary culture. Drawing from a vast archive of found footage, the work samples voices of white individuals speaking about race – ranging from right-wing commentators and media figures to YouTubers and self-identified liberal whites. By compiling and recontextualising this material, Breitz exposes the recurring language and anxieties that underpin public and private discourse on whiteness, privilege and identity.
The installation features Breitz herself performing these sampled voices in a minimal, white cyclorama. Dressed in a white shirt and donning a series of inexpensive blonde wigs, she lip-syncs to clips that span casual ignorance, victimhood, defensiveness and outright hostility. Her eerie use of pale contact lenses further destabilises the gaze, making her appear both hyper-visible and strangely vacant. The effect is disorienting and darkly satirical: by reproducing these monologues with precision and affective detachment, Breitz lays bare the ways in which whiteness reasserts itself through habitual speech and self-referential logic.
Presented across two screens, the work invites viewers to reflect on the performative nature of identity and the language through which racial power structures are maintained. ‘Whiteface’ does not target individual speakers, but instead critiques whiteness as an ideological framework and cultural construct. Breitz’s mimicry operates as both exposure and confrontation, using her own body to reflect the contradictions and evasions embedded in racial discourse. In so doing, she creates a space for viewers to examine how whiteness is rehearsed, normalised and protected within everyday speech.
