Taking up a medium evocative of academic settings – the slide show – You are awaited but never as equals (2021) zooms in on a postcard image, decomposes it, and lays bare its underlying violence. The postcard depicts the arrival of a group of West African performers in Vienna in 1896. Arriving by ship after performing in Budapest, the group was “welcomed” by a crowd of hundreds of (white) people staring at them, pointing at them, and dissecting them with their gazes and gestures. The composition of the photograph – and its production as a postcard – emphasizes the opposition between “the norm” and “the Other”, the objectification of Blackness, and the spectacularization of Otherness. By showing only enlarged and dematerialized details of the looks and gestures of the audience, the artist prevents the reproduction of the original visual experience, thus defusing the panoptic, objectifying, and violent white gaze on Black bodies and underlining the extent to which racist ideology was and is inscribed and relayed by an incalculable number of white bodies.

Taking up a medium evocative of academic settings – the slide show – You are awaited but never as equals (2021) zooms in on a postcard image, decomposes it, and lays bare its underlying violence. The postcard depicts the arrival of a group of West African performers in Vienna in 1896. Arriving by ship after performing in Budapest, the group was “welcomed” by a crowd of hundreds of (white) people staring at them, pointing at them, and dissecting them with their gazes and gestures. The composition of the photograph – and its production as a postcard – emphasizes the opposition between “the norm” and “the Other”, the objectification of Blackness, and the spectacularization of Otherness. By showing only enlarged and dematerialized details of the looks and gestures of the audience, the artist prevents the reproduction of the original visual experience, thus defusing the panoptic, objectifying, and violent white gaze on Black bodies and underlining the extent to which racist ideology was and is inscribed and relayed by an incalculable number of white bodies.