Emergence is a video installation by Nadine Valcin created to counter the violence of blackface in its representation of Blackness. This piece re-asserts the beauty of Blackness and challenges the reductive nature of contemporary Canadian blackface through extreme close-ups of black faces in all their diversity.
Shot in extreme slow motion and projected by two projectors at a large scale on two screens, they appear to be stills at first, but reveal themselves over time to be moving images. These parts of lips, noses, eyes, posit the face as a signifying landscape. Serene images contrast with others that depict faces and arms pressed against glass, at once distorting them and alluding to the constraining conditions that trap black bodies in stereotypes as well as their struggle to break free.
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