Heather Agyepong and Doyle Wham present Reclaiming Our Gaze: a reflection, a response and a call to arms inspired by the artist’s award-winning series Wish You Were Here.

These revolutionary words were spoken by Aida Overton Walker, the vaudeville performer whose subversive mastery and graceful ownership of the Cake-Walk dance in the early C20th created a new and necessary archetype for Black performers. The dance was originally performed by enslaved people mimicking their slave owners and high society, yet was received with great rapture by white audiences. It continued to grow in popularity after emancipation and spread rapidly across America and Europe, culminating in 1902 with Aida Overton Walker’s elegant, skillful interpretation of the dance which saw her dubbed ‘the queen of the Cake-Walk’. The Cake-Walk and its dancers’ legacies are intrinsically tied to their primary mode of documentation - photography. The photographic archive reveals the indelible imprint of the white gaze: exoticizing, degrading and often grotesque. Nonetheless, the defiance and poise of figures such as Walker shines through. Over a century later, the continued significance and urgency of her message is captured by Heather Agyepong, whose series Wish You Were Here sees her reimagine and be guided by Walker. Agyepong’s work raises vital questions around the reclamation of the gaze, and how that functions in live performance, visual arts and society at large, as well as exemplifying the need for rest, release and radical self-worth. Her work speaks not just to the eye and to the mind, but to the soul. While Overton reclaimed the Cake-Walk in 1902, the need for continual reclamation across the cultural sphere persists. It is a constant negotiation that is seen sharply in the public, media-heavy environments that Black performers, and women in particular, must navigate. The recent racial attacks on Francesca Amewudah-Rivers for her casting in Romeo and Juliet are a notable example, yet one which above all illustrates the strength in solidarity. Through many means including an open letter, over 800 Black actors came together in a show of support and unity, demonstrating the power of collective uprising to reshape narratives and own space, on one’s own terms. The following artworks selected from Wish You Were Here embody the call to arms of both Heather Agyepong and Aida Overton Walker, offering paths forward towards the reclamation of their gaze.