Kandis Williams: A Cave

Kandis Williams returns to RAM with A Cave, a new body of work that extends her practice of collage as a tool of Black feminist resistance — following The Great Camouflage, which she co-curated with X Zhu-Nowell in the museum's fall 2025 season. Drawing on concepts from Odette Casamayor-Cisneros's Worldmaking Otherwise: Black Women's Epistemological Marronage in the Americas, alongside Joan Kee's The Geometries of Afro Asia, Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents, and Tao Leigh Goffe's Dark Laboratory, the exhibition triangulates not a liberatory future but speculative afterlives for Afro-Asian sites of intersection—deploying fiction and exaggerated fairy-tale forms to unpack mythological storytelling within these geometries. Film, collage, and publication-based works together pursue a layered reading of 'as above, so below' relations, shaped by the autonomy and strategic hold of the cave and the hidden claims of both high and low Afro-Asian cultural forms. At the center of the film is a woman who is also a rock formation—a giantess, summoned into human form—through whom Williams weaves fairy tale and horror using experimental special-effects techniques; accompanying wall texts and images, generated through Williams's parallel roles as researcher and curator, illuminate the work-in-progress dimensions of the film's narrative and the political stakes of fiction as a mode of reckoning.