Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts
- Shona Hunter
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts (Halász and Hunter, 2025) is an artistic intervention into Whiteness as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. Created by artists Shona Hunter and Katalin Halász, it was presented at the Absolute Disorder Exhibition, IVSA 2025, Suwon Cultural Centre, Seoul, South Korea.
The essay film at its heart explores racialised and gendered disobedience in the artistic process of producing and engaging with the video installation You Are Invited (Halász and Hunter, 2023), which was manifested at the 2024 IVSA annual conference at the Universidad Veracruzana (Xalapa, Mexico), at the Critical Making & Justice exhibition (2023, The Pratt Institute, NYC) and at the Gender, Work & Organization annual conference (2023, Stellenbosch University, SA).
Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts is organised in five Acts, each considering the question whether global power dynamics of race and gender relations could be affectively decentred through the artistic process of creating (authors and collaborators) and participating (visitors) in the affective bodily practice of disobedience. The five Acts of ‘Care’, ‘Investment, ‘Interest’, ‘Expectation’ and ‘Stakes’ respectively gesture towards the relationally extended interdependences across global colonial time and space.
Both artworks (You are Invited and Disobedient Bodies) combine video with installation art, into which the viewer physically enters and thus produces the work with their corporeal presence and embodied situatedness (Bishop 2005; Halász 2017, 2019, 2023). The respective videos of the two pieces are integrated into an arranged environment, using a single screen projection, objects, and a carefully laid table as a central space for participants to gather. The installations work with the affective embodied relationality of race within our current global coloniality (Hunter and van der Westhuizen 2021). The aim of both is to explore the (im)possibility of disrupting Whiteness through the practice of collective gathering and the situatedness of the knowing bodies of creators and participants. Working together as two cis hetero white women from a feminist decolonial abolitionist identified point of view through the artworks we are investigating the (im)possibilities of being Otherwise in the global colonial Northwest.
Disobedient Bodies extends the analysis and experience in You are Invited through a reflexive analysis of the relationalities produced through and producing the artworks. It uses reflections and feedback from interviews undertaken with participants at exhibition sites aswell as reflections offered in the artists books, to pose further questions around the role of artistic practice and making in reproducing the intersectional dynamics of global colonial cis heteropatriarchal Whiteness.
In our 2025 article 'Relationality, Affect and the Wound of Race: A Conversation on an Artistic Intervention into Global Colonial Whiteness', for the journal Coils of the Serpent, we reflect on our making of the artworks in the context of our investments 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.
This article takes the form of a conversation concerning the latest iterations of our ongoing artistic interventions into Whiteness 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 Korea. 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.
Disobedient Bodies Film Credits
post-production and sound design Andreas Landeck
Texts:
Oral history interview with Howard Kester, August 25, 1974, Civil Rights Digital Library, https://crdl.usg.edu/record/noa_sohpcr_b-0007-2 [accessed Nov 2023]
Oral history interview with Nancy Kester Neale, August 6, 1983, Civil Rights Digital Library,
https://crdl.usg.edu/people/neale_nancy_alice_kester_1934 [accessed Nov 2023]
Baldwin, James. 1953. 'The Stranger in the Village', Harper's Magazine, Oct 1953 Issue,
https://harpers.org/archive/1953/10/stranger-in-the-village/ [accessed Nov 2023]
Sound/Voiceover:
Rodgers, Lloyd. On questions of responsibility Act II
https://www.chosic.com/download-audio/24845/ [accessed Nov 2023]
Bedő, Szaffi. 2022.
Moving image:
Queues at dawn to see the queen lying in state, Associated Press, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrNGWNn7zmQ [accessed Nov 2023]
Spider Crawls On Queen Elizabeth's Coffin At Funeral, Access Hollywood, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdWXXGHp4xk [accessed Nov 2023]
The fantastic anatomy of spiders - all you have to know, Explanation-Avenue, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpuqwfKR66U [accessed Nov 2023]
World record Most Spiders On A Body For 30 Seconds, Pretty Things, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YpPf6Ds4k [accessed Nov 2023]
Friendship Baptist Church Lunch 1989, Coffee Break Show, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEeO7SNCYU4 [accessed Nov 2023]
Charles and Camilla Enjoy Tea and Cake at Big Jubilee Lunch, The Royal Family Channel, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHjj-pfkXl0 [accessed Nov 2023]
The Exterminating Angel original trailer 1962, HD Retro Trailers, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysYG7qaz29c [accessed Nov 2023]
The Triangle of Sadness official international trailer 2022, Hulu, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYDidXdG1Wc [accessed Nov 2023]
The Witches of Eastwick official trailer 1987, Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers, Youtube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLs1y_KSTKk [accessed Nov 2023]
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to our audience members in New York City (USA), Stellenbosch (South Africa), Xalapa (Mexico), and Suwon (South Korea) for sharing their views and perspectives, and for granting permission to audio-record their interviews.
Funding
The creators received financial support for the research and authorship from
The Leverhulme Trust, Leeds Beckett University and Northumbria University.
Exhibition links
More about the Exhibition can be found in the exhibition catalogue and at the IVSA website.
Image Credits Roland Mizon, Shona Hunter 2025
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