Relationality, Affect and the Wound of Race: A Conversation on an Artistic Intervention into Global Colonial Whiteness

Abstract

This article takes the form of a conversation concerning the latest iterations of our ongoing artistic interventions into Whiteness1 as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. We created two interconnected video installations—You Are Invited (Halász and Hunter 2023) and Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts (Halász and Hunter 2025)—which we have presented over the past two years in various White institutional spaces across the USA, South Africa, Mexico, and South Korea2. This conversation captures our thinking as it has developed in the making of the artworks and in a constant exchange with participants in the installations. Engaging with extended reflections of one participant who experienced the video installation You are Invited in the USA, we consider why we are invested 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. As an entry point into our discussion, we consider our use of the African American writer James Baldwin’s 19533 essay “Stranger in the Village” in the artwork’s staging of a confrontation with the collective wound of race. We start here because critically analysing this use from the point of view of installation participants tells us something about the way Whiteness works through the tensions between representational and affective registers. If heeded, this tension can assist the move towards racialised accountability with care in artmaking. Where this tension is not heeded, it risks reproducing the same old White story. We present our conversation with the essay film Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts, which we encourage you to watch in full here [ https://www.katalinhalasz.com/s-projects-basic-1 ] before you read what follows in this paper. We also present screenshots of the video and photos of the installations in the text where they help guide the reader to a particular part of the film under discussion. We begin this piece with a short introduction overviewing the two video installations and the theoretical underpinnings. We then outline the conversational methodology we employ in this piece. We note how this conversational form relates to our theoretical approach along with the rationale for including a long excerpt from an interview with an installation participant as part of this conversation. The main body of the paper consists of the conversation about the making and experiencing of the installations.