上海外滩美术馆 Rockbund Art Museum

“一个洞穴”是艺术家坎迪斯·威廉姆斯（1985年生于巴尔的摩）的首场亚洲机构个展。同时身兼上海外滩美术馆2025年秋季展览“伟大的掩饰”联合策展人的威廉姆斯将在展览内呈现全新的影像以及拼贴作品，延续她将拼贴创作作为黑人女性主义抵抗工具的长期艺术实践。“洞穴”的创作受启发于多位学者的研究，而其中最为重要的包含了古巴裔美国文化学者奥黛特·卡莎麦尔西斯涅罗的“另类创世：美洲黑人女性的知识逃逸史”（Worldmaking Otherwise: Black Women's Epistemological Marronage in the Americas），韩裔美国艺术史学者奇廷泫的《亚非几何》（The Geometries of Afro Asia），华裔美国历史学者骆里山的《四大洲的亲密性》（The Intimacies of Four Continents），以及美国黑人文学家与艺术家陶·利·戈夫的《黑暗实验室》（Dark Laboratory），进而探讨一种架构于推测性的亚非未来，而非泛泛的想象一个自由的未来。

展览透过虚构与被夸张化的童话形式，剖析这些“几何关系”中的神话叙事机制，并以影像、拼贴和出版物对不同亚非语境内的“如其在上，如其在下”权力关系展开多层次的解读，而其中阐述的不仅仅是“洞穴”作为一种空间想象的自主性与策略性，也衬托了不同“高低”亚非文化形式中隐匿的主体性。新委任的影像作品核心是一位由巨岩化形的女巨人，透过实验性特效技术，威廉姆斯将童话与恐怖元素编织进叙事中，与之相伴的墙面文本与图像也源自她作为研究者与策展人的双重角色，揭示了影片叙事尚在生成的过程中所有的特征，以及将虚构作为一种“对抗与清算”方式所承载的政治意义。

“坎迪斯·威廉姆斯：一个洞穴”由上海外滩美术馆主办，馆长兼首席策展人朱筱蕤（X Zhu-Nowell）策划，策展人钱诗怡提供支持。

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.

Kandis Williams: A Cave is curated by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of Rockbund Art Museum, with the support of Sam Shiyi Qian, Curator.