Artist Kandis Williams on Fairy Tales

This story is taken from the Spring/Summer 2026 situation of AnOther Magazine: 

“Being a Black woman is strange because I’m carrying these almost fairy-tale-like exaggerations in my own body. When I went to Asia recently, someone said, ‘You look like Beyoncé.’ Another person told me that I look like Mother Nature. I can trace that trail of images and associations back to colonial projects and mass media, but I live in a body where I know those images come before me. It’s almost like this enchanted forest – you might get lost in that ugliness or get taken to a strange, golden realm when you’re mistaken for this kind of mystical being. Travelling between Shanghai and London for work has really stretched the experience of Blackness from fetishism and adoration to super-intense structural exclusion. It’s like being rendered as small as a bug and then as big as a giant. I’m writing a fairy tale right now for a solo show, so I guess that process has been about tapping into those very personal experiences for the surrealisms and fictions they hold already. I realised that we don’t need to reframe existing fairy tales – we just need new stories that provide a practice for transforming, for waking after long sleeps and for weird encounters with witches and warlocks who shackle or chain us. We have to go in search of new quests, figure out new elixirs. I think that is going to be the kind of exaggeration that gets some people through this political and cultural moment. It’s not going to be Captain America or Prince Charming, right?”

Stories are elementary to the observe of the artist Kandis Williams. Not simply the telling of tales, however their development, their dissemination and their energy to form how we collectively perceive emotions corresponding to hurt, guilt, disgrace, worry and justice. “There’s a need for fiction and fairy tales to keep grounding us and teaching us how to be human to each other,” she says. Born in Baltimore however now based mostly in Berlin, Williams works throughout collage, movie, efficiency, writing and publishing (by way of her imprint, Cassandra Press) to unearth the erasure, displacement and commodification of Black our bodies and forge a brand new blueprint for “understanding dignity and Blackness in the same breath”. Her work could be discovered within the everlasting collections of MoMA in New York and the Hammer Museum and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

This story options within the Spring/Summer 2026 situation, marking 25 years of AnOther Magazine, on sale now.