Halloween Special: DecameronTV

To celebrate our favourite holiday this year we joined forces with Red Bull Arts to bring you videos from artists whose practices both commemorate and complicate the spirit of Halloween. Using ghosts, monsters, costumes and the uncanny as strategies to remember the faithful and unfaithful departed, disinterring themes of family, colonialism, camp, and terror. 

Participating artists include Charlie Mai, Kembra Pfahler, Marnie Weber, Bri Williams, and Kandis Williams.

DecameronTV is a video series started by Red Bull Arts based on Giovanni Bocaccio’s novella which chronicles frame stories by people quarantining outside Florence during the Black Plague. Tune in below if you dare.


Kembra Pfahler, I Believe in Halloween
What better way to celebrate spooky season than by following Kembra Pfahler out on an evening stroll? Consider this video a reminder to add its namesake track to your Halloween playlist. Filmed by Steven Harwick.


Charlie Mai, Bones in the Attic
Rooted in the grisly existence of human trophies of war, seized from East and Southeast Asia by American soldiers, Charlie Mai’s video deliberately eschews personal violence for communal respite. In this horror story, those who haunt are recognized and laid to rest, at last shrouded in life.


Marnie Weber, Night of Forevermore
A pig weeps and crows caw as miscreants and grotesques convene in this tableau vivant by Marnie Weber. An old witch (played by the artist) indoctrinates a younger witch (Weber’s daughter, Colette Shaw), who enters purgatory to be cast into a new abyss—one not quite of fire and brimstone. Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery.

Kandis Williams, White Dissonance and Horror
William’s video, an excerpt from the White Dissonance and Horror class offered at Cassandra Press, is their take on Candyman. Stills and key moments from the movie are interspersed over a discussion on the racial politics prevalent in the film and in society at the time of original release.


Bri Williams, Night Terrors
In this disorienting video, Bri Williams recounts three consecutive spells of visceral night terrors.