Affect: Network: Territory was performed at Human Resources L.A. in August 2016. | Photo: John Tain
Inside the darkened gallery at Chinatown art space Human Resources Los Angeles, a dancer lays underneath a sheet of mirror hanging from the ceiling. Laser lights shoot through the darkness as the mirror dangles over his neck like a guillotine. From the front, the mirror erases his head, creating a double of his body, laid prone on the ground. He slides out from underneath, and performs a complicated panoply of moves, striding and leaping around the room in sometimes ferocious, sometimes delicate motions. It has been hinted on the invitation to the performance that viewers are encouraged to, at their own discretion, capture the performance on their camera phones.
The performance by artist Kandis Williams and dancer Josh Johnson, titled Affect: Network: Territory, was an experiment based on the scene that plays out across America on what seems like a daily basis. A black man - his body - moves through the world, is surveilled, violence is enacted upon him, images are taken and distributed, and then viewed by millions across the internet. A few weeks after the performance at a restaurant near her apartment in Skid Row, Williams tells Artbound that the interactions were based on the concept of aesthetic wit(h)nessing, a neologism coined by Israel-born painter and psychoanalytical theorist Bracha Ettinger.
What exactly is wit(h)nessing? In an academic paper titled Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma, University of Leeds' Griselda Pollock defines it as such: [Ettinger] expands a word's conceptual range from the legal and testimonial meaning of bearing witness to the crime against the other, to being with, but not assimilated to, and to being beside the other in a gesture that is much more than mere ethical solidarity. There is risk; but there is also a sharing.
Affect: Network: Territory was performed at Human Resources L.A. in August 2016. | Photo: John Tain
Williams takes Ettinger's idea - giving a psychological closeness to the viewers during the performance - and adds another psychoanalytic model to draw the audience into the scene of a police shooting of a black man, e.g. the shooting of Philando Castile, in which his fianc e Diamond Reynolds, filmed the aftermath. Williams held a workshop at Human Resources prior to the performance in which the wit(h)nessing was amplified by threeing, a psycho-therapeutic role playing model used in group therapies.
For our purposes, one person was a perpetrator,' one person was a victim,' and one person was a witness,' Williams says. So, [it took on] the model of the shooting videos, but we built into the rules a dissonance, because we were talking about, in America, there are so many operatives that are obscured, so many identities that are formed out of dissonance. We had each of the participants use their own camera to record their movements throughout the space, and what we ended up with was a weird psycho-geographic tagging, of the space - where people were hiding, where people felt safe, where it was comfortable to be, where it was not comfortable to be.
Kandis Williams, Separation, Temptation Blake Son I, 2014. Mixed Media on Paper. 45.25 x 42 (115.57 x 106.68 cm.).
--
--
The mix of Ettinger's wit(h)nessing and Williams' own stylistic developments is a fine example of the way she effortlessly blends psychoanalytical theory and personal experience. I first came across Williams' work in a group show at the Underground Museum in 2014, where she presented a series of black-and-white photo collages, a medium she continues to investigate. In one noteworthy image, Williams collages four young girls - Sigmund Freud's daughters Sophie and Anna spliced into a photograph of Williams and her sister - smiling on an Easter Sunday.
It was interesting to see that overlap of these doctor's daughters - and one future doctor, [Anna Freud] - and compare and contrast those life stories instead of using the actual model of analysis, Williams says.
The collages, Williams explains, have roots in psychoanalysis, but in what she describes as an anthropological way.
Kandis Williams, That of linking with the unknown and bonding in unions with others in the process of becoming and transforming oneself puts patriarchy in danger (Ettinger), 2014. Mixed Media on Paper. 47 x 31.5 (120.3 x 80 cm.).
That whole series is about the question of therapy and who therapy is for, she says. Life events end up becoming theoretical. Freud is a crazy example, because his theories are so embedded in how we understand media, literature, and ourselves. But then, he was a psycho. And a lot of his personal hang-ups come out of inter-personal dynamics with his contemporaries and his family. It's really funny. There's [intellectual scholar] Hortense Spillers, who has an essay called Psychoanalysis and Race,' and Ettinger, who has a book called The Matrixial Borderspace,' which is kind of an interruption of the psychoanalytic model where the phallus is the first confrontation that you have, or the realization that you have with phallus or the fear of castration or the envy of not having one.
(In The Matrixial Borderspace,' Ettinger hypothesizes that if we conceive our connections to each other being less about a connection to phallic thinking and more a matrixial, or womb-like, entering into each other, then we would be embracing unknowns.)
Kandis Williams, Linking Borderspaces, 2014. Sketch Mixed Media on Paper. 36 x 34 (91.44 x 86.36 cm.).
Taking her grounding in theory one step further, Williams often binds her work with a series of readers, photocopied books full of essays and excerpts that Williams is currently thinking about, offered as a way of understanding her work.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
Latino Film Institute Fellows Screen Their Short Films at the Egyptian Theatre
The Inclusion Fellowship and Spark Animation Grant uplifts 15 ...
29/05/2026
GLOOKAST LAUNCHES CINNAFILM TACHYON PLUGIN FOR MEDIA PRODUCER AND MEDIA SERVICES
This release first appeared here.
Visit our Tachyon product page or contact...
29/05/2026
May 29 2026, 09:00 (PDT) Dolby and rednote Bring More Immersive Storytelling to...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
Affect: Network: Territory was performed at Human Resources L.A. in August 2016. | Photo: John Tain 
