Shakespeare says all the worldвЂ™s a stage, but whose stage?

The scholar Katherine McKittrick demonstrates how much visual hierarchy goes back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and how as a result almost every unit of popular measure is some evidence of white supremacy, and thereby some level of erasure. When he calls the stage a moral institution, it raises the question of how indebted our social structures are to the lines of the modern theater - and by extension media, which has become a stage. WILLIAMS ThatвЂ™s a quote from Oskar Schlemmer, the theorist and propmaster of the Bauhaus theater. One includes the line: вЂњBetween cult and theater lies the stage as a moral institution.вЂќ

MITTER Your new collages have titles that abound with references to dance history and ideas. Brenda Dixon Gottschild says that the Black body keeps the measure of popular culture. WILLIAMS The rush of diversity and inclusion campaigns has put performing Black bodies in places that have to negotiate racist performative expectations and anti-racist sentiments simultaneously. SIOBHAN BURKE WeвЂ™re also seeing more Black ballet dancers in corporate advertising. Black TikTokers, for example, are pervasively appropriated. And I donвЂ™t think itвЂ™s coincidental that we now see, in our art markets and commercial markets, a renewed interest in positioning Black bodies and dancers. Tall plants set about the gallery appear to break the theme, but on close inspection they are artificial, some leaves imprinted with eyes or colored in flesh tones, returning attention to the body.ДЄnd weвЂ™re in a moment right now: Last year saw a proliferation of us, especially in Black communities worldwide, trying to disassociate and disidentify from caricature, state-sanctioned violence, social scripts that have been destructive to our community. Some of the collages are marked with annotations, the artist thinking out loud about affect, performance and politics.ДЄ video installation, presented on six squat old-school monitors, shows a dancer following lines on a studio floor, working through routines that Williams choreographed, as archival video flickers on a background screen-within-each-screen.

There, she worked with three Black dancers versed in ballet and modern dance, exploring how they have learned within, but also resisted, the enduring racial and gender conventions of their training. Large-scale collages on grid-lined paper mingle archival photographs of dancers and choreographers - some recognizable to aficionados, such as Alvin Ailey, George Balanchine and Martha Graham - with photographs Williams made in her studio. Dance is both the central theme and a lens to inspect contemporary culture in вЂњA Line,вЂќ the debut New York solo exhibition of the multimedia artist Kandis Williams, and the inaugural presentation of 52 Walker, the new space that the David Zwirner gallery has opened in Tribeca.

Fall borders black and white