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

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.