White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece (documentation clip)

White Skin, Black Kin: a Creole Conversation Piece (2003) - detail of main video (silent). This documentation clip includes separate sound tracks from the gallery space added / layered to give an idea of the sound in the gallery (accessible only by the viewer pressing their ear to small speakers on the wall).

This multi-media video installation re-creates an eighteenth-century painting to examine postcolonial racial identity and representation. Staged within an opulent plantation Great House, the fictitious “family portrait” reveals hidden stories beneath the surface masquerade that allude to interwoven racial histories. While the white family members visually articulate (frozen) social and familial propriety in their well-decorated drawing room, the illusory black “family” members are shown to symbolically unravel the inconsistencies within the household through devices of visual and / or sound intervention.

See https://www.joscelyngardner.org/white-skin-black-kin