The Brooklyn Rail

The red-and-white checkered picnic blanket spread taut and affixed to the wall with wood and barbed wire sets the scene for the backroom encounters that KING COBRA puts on display in Heathens, where visitors are met with an array of gimp masks fashioned from pink silicon. Each mask is unique in its grotesqueness. For example, The Grand High Witch of All the World (all works 2026) has tiny eye holes made of grommets and mouths that are sealed with plastic zip ties, which here look like three oversize teeth and a lace collar. Another, Skinhead, only has one grommet for the nose, which only makes the blemishes on the skin and thick stitches used to contour the head more visible. Yet another, Trojan Horse, has a bobbing hobby horse for a body, stringy blonde hair, and a bright pair of silicon red lips permanently parted and attached with black elastic. The effect of facing these variations on white abjection, rendered from the same sickly, festering pink silicon summons disgust and overwhelm. The exhibition can feel a little bit like entering a pantheon to the horror of whiteness; to attach these ideas to our current moment even further, there is even a miniature Washington monument called The Monument made from the same pink skin.

But KING COBRA is more subtle than that. Sit with these masks for a bit longer and more subversive humor begins to emerge. One of the first things to notice is that these hoods are stuffed with raffia so that stray bits of fiber hang from the bottom of each sculpture. Seeing this raffia brought me toward several different lines of thought. First, it underlined KING COBRA’s emphasis on the constructedness of these objects and presumably whiteness itself. None of what is presented suggests that “whiteness” is smooth or seamless; instead, these masks ask us to think about all the different types of narratives that have been stitched together to produce this idea of white power and dominance, and to consider not only its fundamental incoherence, but also its monstrosity. Second, the raffia offers a very literal materialization of the “straw man,” the logical fallacy dispatched with ease to show the dominance of the other side of the argument. We might even make a connection between these figures and the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz who is on a quest to find a brain.

The exhibition’s second room does not sever this set of associations but makes them more complex. It is here, alongside a few other gimp masks, that KING COBRA offers a large hanging parasite (The White Male Parasite), an illustrated Bible on a pedestal coated in white silicon in a texture that mimics ejaculate (White Jesus), and an old fashioned antennaed cathode ray television set piece complete with a red, white, and blue fabric weaving and a glass bowl filled with peppermints that plays a twenty-four-minute compilation of films featuring different moments of white subservience to Black domination (Foie Gras). It is in this room that the full force of KING COBRA’s subversion and play becomes evident. While KING COBRA’s repeated use of the gimp mask already primes us to think about BDSM as an important concept in relation to Heathens, it is in the second room that we shift toward thinking more about Black femme and nonbinary domination.

When used in BDSM practice, gimp masks anonymize the wearer, turning them into a body to be used and erasing all markers of individuality. And while there can be a sense of liberation in doing this, KING COBRA asks us to hold this alongside the knowledge that they are the one in control. This is something that we understand as part of the conceptual apparatus of the exhibition—they have made these objects to display a type of universal whiteness abjection—but when we see snippets of KING COBRA and other Black femmes and nonbinary people as actual doms, guiding movement and drawing out a desire to be topped—perhaps by Blackness itself—a set of racialized power dynamics emerges. Here, what I see is that KING COBRA has asked us to think about the way in which whiteness desires punishment from Black people and that acts of white violence are layered with the erotic attraction to Blackness, even if this is repressed. Appropriately enough, Frantz Fanon wrote about these dynamics in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), where he described white American fantasies of lynching as the product of masochism, not sadism. It is this set of desires that I think KING COBRA mobilizes with this investigation into white fantasies of submission.

I will point out that Blackness is only made visible in the video clips that cycle through Foie Gras, and there is something in this withholding of the Black body that asks us to nuance our thinking on domination. On the one hand, KING COBRA wields the power to represent and is bowed down to. On the other hand, these forms of mediation suggest that we do not have access to Black desire itself and that, actually, it isn’t part of these white desires to submit and appears only as a cipher. In the end, then, Heathens offers a reveal about whiteness’s appetites, sickness, and self-victimization.