Candice BreitzWhiteface, 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.
In Whiteface, Breitz appropriates and ventriloquizes dozens of voices drawn from this archive, channelling them through her own white body. 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 un-wigged appearance among the characters that populate the piece, serves to acknowledge the artist’s own embeddedness in whiteness.
Yet, while Breitz and many of the disembodied voices that she lip-syncs may be recognisable in Whiteface (Tucker Carlson, Rachel Dolezal, Bill Maher, Richard Spencer and Robin Di Angelo all make vocal cameos), specific white folks are not the primary target of this stinging satire. Rather, it is the condition of whiteness that Breitz seeks to prod into visibility. Dislocated from the white people who originally uttered them, the words that stream through Breitz
accumulate to provide a scathing study of the vocabulary and grammar underlying this condition, a critical survey of the language via which whiteness frames, normalises and leverages its power.
The white dogma that flows through Breitz will be deeply familiar to those whose lives are impacted by racism. Whiteface is a portrait of whiteness in a state of panic. As the privileged status of white people comes under increasing pressure, narratives about white extinction have multiplied across the political spectrum. At a time when we are all threatened by possible extinction in light of the climate change crisis and other looming threats, Whiteface parodies the absurdity of white extinction anxiety—which, perhaps more than any other expression of whiteness, points to the delusional narcissism at the heart of the condition. Breitz’s deliberately theatrical performance in Whiteface draws attention to the constructed nature of whiteness and other racial categories. Her 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.
