Sondra’s videos and performances explore a social idea of seeing and being seen, of how we’re made up of many images that only ever capture some truths at the expense of others. In generous, vulnerable and funny ways, her work unpicks the assumption that we’re all distinct individuals and instead charts how our desires, struggles and capacities move through and create us commonly. They disobey the ways in which we are commanded to be, live, think or feel (as separate from each other, our bodies private carceral spaces) and celebrate our overabundant social entanglement and complicity instead. They remind us of how we can see ourselves, stripped of powers’ attempts to grasp us.

Sondra Perry

Sondra’s recent event in London was one of the best performances we’ve seen in a long time – a kind of generative, generous, humble and funny exploration of the themes of sociality and entanglement as they arise in the Black Radical Tradition, and the thinking of some prominent past collaborators on Episodes, inc. Fred Moten, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, amongst others. Her multi-media installations, videos and performances are both highly political and acutely familiar with everyday experiences of digital life, popular media, socially and culturally constructed identity and the status of the black body in a not-so-post-racial society. “I’ve been thinking about how imaging people works – I think about…a series of dots that make up who a person is and all their experience, that are all very much connected. And so the closer you are to this series of dots the more complex that figure or subject becomes, and the further away you get from it, the more solid and flatter that subject becomes. What I’m trying to do is get as close to the subject as possible.”