KIYAN WILLIAMS

Ruins of Empire II or the Earth Swallows the Master’s House, 2024
Installation View, 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than The Real Thing, March 20- September 29

Ruins of Empire II or The Earth Swallows the Master's House, presented in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, Even Better Than The Real Thing, reimagines the neoclassical portico, a symbol of both the State and the Plantation, and is built using earth from the same quarry where enslaved laborers excavated materials for the nation’s capital. The accumulated memory of extracted Black labor that is foundational to the country emerges through the cracks of the soil surface. Leaning off-axis as if decomposing into the ground, Ruins articulates a grammar of unbuilding, reflecting a sculptural gesture of fragility. Installed outdoors, the forces of time, gravity, wind, and rain act on and erode the antimonument. In William’s work the earth and weather are protagonists and collaborators. Viewers are invited to walk on and inhabit the sculpture, leaving traces of their presence in the malleable threshold. For Williams, haptic intimacy is an important mode of encounter.