A TRAVEL GUIDE: BLACK GOTHIC IN SOUTH KOREAN HORROR (2025)

Kandis Williams presents A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025), a new video work constructed through multi-source collage that critically and subjectively examines what it means for Black culture and Black bodies to move through the world, from the era of Jim Crow laws to the present.

The video unfolds as a travel journal, research essay, and a dérive of associative thought, narrated in the artist’s first-person voice, following her journey through South Korea, from Seoul to Gwangju, Jeju, Busan, and Gyeongju. Horror cinema, K-pop, digital media, natural landscapes, memorials and K-beauty aisles merge into a single political space across which Williams guides the viewers in discerning between ghosts and ancestors.
Referencing The Negro Motorist Green Book, the work reflects on mobility as power and its denial as a product of surveillance and racialised control, while confronting the ongoing aestheticisation of Black pain in contemporary culture. Parallels between Black and South Korean collective memories emerge through themes of militarisation, state violence, and unresolved mourning. Music culture operates as a central thread, tracing the circulation of Black musical forms into global pop culture and revealing their ghostly yet pervasive presence.

BIOGRAPHY

Kandis Williams (born in Baltimore, 1985; lives in Berlin) is an artist whose practice spans collage, dramaturgy, writing, and publishing, centering the body and movement as tools to examine the biopolitical dynamics of representation. She is the co-founder of the publishing platform Cassandra Press, through which she critically engages with the history and representation of Black and female bodies. Major solo exhibitions include an upcoming presentation at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2026), as well as solo shows at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (both 2025), and at 52 Walker, New York (2021). Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

2 LIZARDS (2020)

Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki present 2 Lizards (2020), an eight-part animated video series widely regarded as one of the most perceptive artistic documents of the early 21st century.

Produced during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project observes life in New York through two anthropomorphic lizard avatars voiced by the artists, set against rooftops, empty streets, Zoom parties and news alerts. Though rooted in a specific urban crisis, the work transforms boredom, fear, absurdity, and fleeting joy into a shared emotional language that resonates globally. Blending live action with 2D and 3D animation, the artists intertwine documentary, science fiction, and popular digital culture with diasporic imaginaries. Playful yet incisive, 2 Lizards dissolves boundaries between real and virtual, private and collective, proposing humor and vulnerability as tools to reflect on collective memory and lived urban experience.

BIOGRAPHY

The New York-based artist Meriem Bennani (born in Rabat, 1988) and film director Orian Barki (born in Tel Aviv, 1985) are long-time collaborators. Their practices intersect in the production of moving-image works that have become internationally recognised, from 2 Lizards (2020) to Bouchra (2025); starting from their first launch on Bennani's Instagram feed, until presentations in 2025 at the Toronto International Film Festival, 63rd New York Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and ICA London.
Alongside her collaborative work with Barki, Bennani creates immersive installations interweaving globalised popular culture and digital technologies with the vernacular of her native Morocco. Generating speculative universes that employ cartoon aesthetics, she deconstructs dichotomies between the West and the Global South.
Whether working solo or as a duo, their work has been presented in major exhibitions at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2025); Fondazione Prada, Milan (2024); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); and MoMA PS1, New York (2016), and is included in public collections such as the Guggenheim, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

MY BODILY REMAINS, YOUR BODILY REMAINS AND ALL THE BODILY REMAINS THAT EVER WERE AND EVER WILL BE (2023—2025)

Tai Shani presents My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains and All the Bodily Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be (2023–2025), a new production derived from the 2023 cinematographic work co-commissioned by Art Night (London), CAC Cincinnati, KM21 (The Hague), and POR:TA (Portugal). The film features an original score composed by Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless, alongside digital animations by Adam Sinclair.

The work draws on key scenes and figures from the original film - including the Ghost for Revolution and the Book of Love - interwoven with a new 3-D animation oscillating between underwater sequences and aerial views of a desert landscape. It unfolds as a technicolour, speculative dream shaped by cinematographic and gaming aesthetics, sci-fi, and spectral registers, reflecting Shani’s ongoing research into non-sovereignty, collective embodiment, and radical affect. Love, grief, and political transformation are articulated through a chorus of voices and embodied presences, framing love and pleasure as emancipatory forces.
The Ghost for Revolution appears as a young red-haired woman, seated in the back seat of a moving car travelling through an imaginary city of difference, opening the work to a collective possibility.

BIOGRAPHY

Tai Shani (born in London, 1976; lives in London) works across performance, film, and installation. Her practice evolves from experimental writing as a generative method, moving between theoretical concepts and visceral detail to construct fragmentary cosmologies of non-sovereignty. She reclaims feminized aesthetic modes such as the floral, the visionary, and the gothic within a register of utopian militancy, drawing on mythic and historical narratives as epic and emotive frameworks. Among her major solo exhibitions are Somerset House, London (2025); Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati and KM21, The Hague (both 2023); and Manchester International Festival (2021). She has also participated in major group exhibitions including British Art Show (2021) and HKW, Berlin (2022). In 2019, she won the Turner Prize, and in 2025 she was awarded the High Line Commission in New York.

CHIARA CARRERA

Chiara Carrera is a researcher and curator whose work focuses on the relationship between architecture and its cultural infrastructures. Her research builds on both academic inquiry and curatorial practice, developed through a PhD in Architecture at Università Iuav di Venezia and through work across independent and institutional contexts. Alongside curatorial projects such as Bruno Alfieri. Publishing and Magazines for Contemporary Art and Architecture and Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. New York 1972/Venice 2020, she has collaborated with institutions such as the Berlin Biennale and the MAXXI Architecture and has taken part in Italian Ministry of Culture research projects.

MARTA BARINA

Marta Barina is an Artistic Director working across exhibition practice and cultural production, operating between institutional and independent contexts through collaborative and transdisciplinary formats. Over the course of a decade in London, she worked in leading international contexts including White Cube and David Zwirner, and later as Studio Director to Oscar Murillo. In 2024, she founded Mare Karina, a gallery and cultural production studio based in Venice and dedicated to contemporary culture, where she develops exhibitions and projects that bring together new generations of artists, institutions, and multidisciplinary platforms, conceiving curatorial practice as a tool for activating new imaginaries and hybrid communities of reference.