The Genres

The Synopsis

Closely cropped white men populate the video work My Bodies. Their faces slide like a corporate PowerPoint over grainy, noisy textures as a host of black women—Jennifer Hudson, Beyoncé, Aaliyah, and Ciara, among others—sing variations on “my body.” They are tightly sampled, as if to arrive at some kind of median. One clip that zooms into the pores of a sweaty pink forehead recalls a robotic text-to-voice line from another work, “And my skin shines with white people’s problems.” Unlike the white men, culled from a Google image search for CEOs, blackness is only ever heard and never seen. The artist explains, “If you came back, would you choose to have the same body or not? Would you have the body of a woman again? Or a woman of color?”

The Cast