Disobedient Bodies: disobedience in Five ActsÂ
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With Katalin Halász
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Post-production & Sound design Andreas LandeckÂ
Video Credit Eunsang Jo fraudster@daum.net (2025) for the IVSAÂ
Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts is an artistic intervention into Whiteness as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. It builds on the creators earlier video installation You are Invited (2023). It stages a video installation investigating bodily resistance to racialised and gendered norms as lived institutional enactments and categorical identifications within cis-heteropatriarchal global colonial whiteness.
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The essay film at its heart is organised in five Acts, each considering the question whether global power dynamics of race and gender relations could be affectively decentred through the artistic process of creating (authors and collaborators) and participating (visitors) in the affective bodily practice of disobedience. The five Acts of ‘Care’, ‘Investment, ‘Interest’, ‘Expectation’ and ‘Stakes’ respectively gesture towards the relationally extended interdependences across global colonial time and space.
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Disobedient Bodies extends the analysis and experience in You are Invited through a reflexive analysis of the relationalities produced through and producing the artworks. It uses reflections and feedback from interviews undertaken with participants at exhibition sites aswell as reflections offered in the artists books, to pose further questions around the role of artistic practice and making in reproducing the intersectional dynamics of global colonial cis heteropatriarchal Whiteness.
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In our 2025 article 'Relationality, Affect and the Wound of Race: A Conversation on an Artistic Intervention into Global Colonial Whiteness', for the journal Coils of the Serpent, we reflect on our making of the artworks in the context of our investments in confronting global colonial Whiteness as white makers and how we grapple through our own ongoing investments in Whiteness as we seek to challenge it through our artistic practice.
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Disobedient Bodies. Table and chairs, found objects. Two channel video installation, colour, sound. 10 mins 25 secs. Suwon, South Korea, June 2025. Image Credit:Â Eunsang Jo fraudster@daum.net (2025) for the IVSAÂ
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Post Production and Sound Design Andreas LandeckÂ
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Production Credits:
Literary Contributions:
Interview with Howard Kester, 25 August 1974, Civil Rights Digital Library, https://crdl.usg.edu/record/noa_sohpcr_b-0007-2 [referenced Nov 2023]
Interview featuring Nancy Kester Neale, 6 August 1983, Civil Rights Digital Library, https://crdl.usg.edu/people/neale_nancy_alice_kester_1934 [referenced Nov 2023]
Baldwin, James. 1953. ‘Stranger in the Village’, Harper’s Magazine, Oct 1953, https://harpers.org/archive/1953/10/stranger-in-the-village/ [referenced Nov 2023]
Audio and Narration:
Rodgers, Lloyd. Act II: On questions of responsibility, sourced from https://www.chosic.com/download-audio/24845/ [referenced Nov 2023]
Bedő, Szaffi. 2022.
Visual Media Content:
Lying in State: Morning Queues for the Late Queen, Associated Press, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrNGWNn7zmQ [referenced Nov 2023]
Observation of a Spider on Queen Elizabeth’s Coffin, Access Hollywood, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdWXXGHp4xk [referenced Nov 2023]
Insights into Spider Anatomy: Essential Facts, Explanation-Avenue, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpuqwfKR66U [referenced Nov 2023]
World Record: Spiders on Body Duration, Pretty Things, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YpPf6Ds4k [referenced Nov 2023]
Friendship Baptist Church Community Lunch 1989, Coffee Break Show, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeO7SNCYU4 [referenced Nov 2023]
Charles and Camilla at the Platinum Jubilee Big Lunch, The Royal Family Channel, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHjj-pfkXl0 [referenced Nov 2023]
The Exterminating Angel 1962 Restoration Trailer, HD Retro Trailers, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysYG7qaz29c [referenced Nov 2023]
Triangle of Sadness Official Preview 2022, Hulu, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYDidXdG1Wc [referenced Nov 2023]
The Witches of Eastwick 1987 Cinema Trailer, Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLs1y_KSTKk [referenced Nov 2023]
You are Invited: Racialised Bodies in DiscomfortÂ
With Katalin Halász
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Post-production & Sound design Andreas LandeckÂ
You Are Invited is a critical intervention and exploration of whiteness as a global colonial formation and as bodily-enacted discomfort.
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The video opens with excerpts of oral history interviews with the American preacher and civil rights activist Howard Kester (1904 – 1977) and his daughter Nancy Kester Neale (1934 – ), talking about the life of the wife and mother Alice Harris Kester, who was active in the American South during the civil rights movement. Alice Harris Kester was reportedly not able to keep her food down when eating at the same table as African Americans. She is one of the white women George Yancy talks about in his essay on ‘White Embodied Gazing’ (2008; 2017). Alice Harris Kester’s life is blended with recent footage celebrating the life and mourning of the death of the British Queen Elizabeth II in 2022. Â
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The second part of the video is set in the mountains of Switzerland and is narrated by the African American writer James Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1955) in which Baldwin reflects on his time in that country.
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To provoke an engagement with the viewers’ implication in the entangled relationship between the personal and the structural, the video works with bodily knowing and conceptualizations of whiteness as power, (class and gender) privilege, white repulsion, anti-racism and empathy; and addresses the role of affective knowledge in moving us towards political solidarity and racial justice.
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Katalin Halász and Shona Hunter, You Are Invited (still), 2022. Two-channel video installation, colour, sound, 4 mins.
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You are Invited teaser
You are Invited. Xalapa University, Mexico, 2024Â Â
You are Invited. Stellenbosch University, South Africa. 2023Â
You are Invited: Pratt Institute, New York. 2023
Future. Identity. Power: Reframing Equality and Justice, Leeds Corn Exchange, 2019.Â
CurationÂ
Future.Identity.Power: Reframing Equality and Justice. With guests: Jay Bernard, Lacy M. Johnson, Sharmila Sen, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan. Headliner - Leeds International Festival of Ideas​ 2020.05.05. (Postponed indefinitely due to Covid-19)
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2020 # Black History Interruptions with Javeria Shah (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)
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2019 # Black History Interruptions with Javeria Shah (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama)Â
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Disorienting Race: Relationally Choreographing Resistance. Rosebowl Leeds. 29.05.2019.Â
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Tidalectic Encounters. performance and public lecture by Christine Checinska. White Cloth Gallery, Leeds. 09.11.2015.
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Public Poetry reading Dorothea Smartt (Ship Shape, Peepal Tree Press) and Jane Liddell-King (Faces in the Void: Czech Survivors of the Holocaust, Shaun Tyas) with Black Cat Promotions. The Old Red Lion, Leeds. 09.07.2009.
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Vanley Burke's By the Rivers of Birminam. FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg, 2014.
Arts developmentÂ
Compass Live Arts (Trustee, 2020 – 2024)
Breaking With Humanity, Castle Cinema, Hackney (panel chair) 19.04.2024.Â
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The Arrivants: A Solo Exhibition by Christine Checinska & The Front Room, Inna Joburg: A Solo Exhibition by Michael Mcmillan. FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. July/August.2016 Invited contributor to accompanying program Intimate archives // Autobiographical acts: Personal Surfacings as expressed through material cultures. 04.-05.08.2016Â
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Symposium on 'Photographies, practices, positionalities', and launch event for the Critical Arts: South-North Media Studies Special Edition 'Archival Address: Photographies, Practices and Positionalities’. White Cloth Gallery, Leeds. Curator and organiser as PI for the British Academy Grant 'Critiquing Institutional Whiteness in Neoliberal Times'. 09.11.2015.
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Hypersampling, Identities, Jozi Style. FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. August/September. 21.09.2015 - 06.10.2015. Invited contributor to accompanying program: including Re-fashioning Masculinities: Identity, Difference, Resistance, Encounter.
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PAST IMPERFECT // FUTURE PRESENT  FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa 24.03.2015-15.05.2015. Invited contributor to accompanying program Archival Addresses: Photographies, Practices, Positionalities, & publication 18-20.03.2015Â
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By The Rivers of Birminam; A Retrospective Exhibition by Vanley Burke. FADA Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. (Chair and organising contributor for accompanying public program.) 24.07.2014 – 15.08.2014.
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'Absolute Disorder' Exhibition. Artists Opening Panel, Suwon Cultural Foundation, 2025.
Panels, Podcasts
& CommentÂ
Decolonising the Civic: Redefine, reclaim, relegate Tribe Arts. Civilising Civilisation: Who Defined the Civic? In conversation with Tribe Arts. 06.10.2021.
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‘White Walls’ script reading, Speak Woman Speak, (Online) Invited Panellist, 21.05.2020.
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How Whiteness Dominates Education. In conversation with Will Tosh for the Shakespeare’s Globe Podcast: Such Stuff (Season 6, Episode 3) 26.08.2020. Â
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# Black History Interruptions 2020. In conversation with Javeria Shah for the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama Podcast: Discover Central (Season 2, Episode 1). 18.10.2020
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Future.Identity.Power: Reframing Equality and Justice. In conversation with Martin Dickson for the Leeds International Festival of Ideas LIFICAST Â (Episode 7). 21.02.2020.Â
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Society’s treatment of Empowered Women in the 21st Century panel in response to the Out of Joint Production of Jane Wenham’s ‘The Witch of Walkern’ . Invited Panellist West Yorkshire Playhouse 23.11.2015.
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