Kiki Dishes It Out: Kiera Boult’s Performance Art Practice

She could be the biracial offspring of Wendy Williams and Dolly Parton. Oprah Winfrey’s earlier vivacious talk-show-host dynamism is also in the mix. There are strands of Andrea Fraser’s satirical verve or even online baiter, Ziwe. She’s a composite figure containing bits of the moneyed, spectacle-driven reality TV housewives from the past decade. Despite these ranging antecedents, the ‘she’ here is a unique construction of the artist Kiera Boult’s own making. This “she” goes by Kiki. The first thing Kiki will likely share about herself upon first interaction is that she’s from Hamilton, Ontario. It’s her proverbial playground, and she’ll gleefully offer you a welcome tour. The post-industrial port city has been as much a stage for Kiki’s zany (mis)adventures as it is a protagonist in Boult’s creative output. More on this later.

Kiki is Boult’s realized fantasy. Among other characteristics, she is an unreliable narrator, a heightened version of the artist’s subconscious, and a political fault-finder. Kiki is ultimately someone Boult hasn’t yet resolved and thus, an open canvas to be continuously explored. Kiki’s trajectory all began as a scene kid at Boult’s high school, long before she became the creative vehicle Boult would make her into. When Boult subsequently enrolled at Ontario College of Art and Design, Kiki reappeared anew through class projects. By the end of Boult’s time in the program, Kiki had developed into an artistic strategy of sorts, tricked out with her own curated visual presence. Having Kiki become a creative project was, for Boult, a way to explore the potential of being an artist without needing to draw or paint, skills that eluded her. It was a strategy for navigating the conventions of art school and, in doing so, discovering the terms of her artistic agency.

In one class project, she had to re-create a canonical performance in art history, so she chose one by Vito Acconci. She couldn’t recall the exact piece when I asked her its title, but she described a vivid memory of Acconci’s forthright engagement with the viewer through the camera. In Boult’s version, instead of a performance for the camera, she chose the bustling streets of Toronto as her live audience. She adopted her Kiki avatar and started the performance piece without much of a plan, merely inviting onlookers to lay with her in public on her sleeping bag. To her surprise, some of the strangers indulged her.

This earlier phase in Kiera’s performance-based practice evinces an innate fearlessness in the face of the watchful gaze of a live audience. It is the same sense of agency that would bolster Kiki and her travails in the years that followed. Speaking with the artist, it is clear the public stage never impedes that internal agency, and being at the centre of everyone’s gaze is where she thrives. Reflecting on her performance in the streets of Toronto, she admits it optically reads as cosplaying houselessness and is an instance of Kiki’s problematics—an effect of her sense of unfiltered “hubris,” she tells me, and perhaps a trace of the artist’s subconscious. This same overbearing hubris will drive Boult years later to orchestrate a live gallery performance to publicly oust and defang Kiki in the piece Kiki Gets Cancelled (2019).

Kiki Gets Cancelled is an illustration of Boult’s not-very PR-friendly, critically reflexive relationship with Kiki. She wasn’t a mere guise Boult performed through anymore. Kiki evolved to become one of the targets of Boult’s conflicted and antagonistic relationship with the institutional art world and the larger cultural and sociopolitical ecosystem from which Kiki emerged and operates in. In many ways, Kiki has created an avenue for harnessing the artist’s sense of agency and freedom. However, Boult never intended her to be pure or free from any snafus. Kiki was modelled after the parasocial connections she formed with some of the aforementioned celebrities who were cultural fixtures growing up in the aughts. In conversation with Boult, she gushes over TV/radio host Wendy Williams, “I get emotional just thinking about her.” The celebrities she bonded with were often women with larger-than-life personalities. They radiated unfettered self-conviction, which held a valuable fascination for Boult. It resonated with a dormant part of her—the part she perhaps couldn’t always broadcast but recognized in these celebrities’ personas. Kiki was crafted with everything celebrities had, including entourages, personal chefs, behind-the-scenes docuseries, stalkers, and NDAs. Kiki became the total package of the people’s princess. This also means she shares some of the same mishandling of cultural power as her celebrity predecessors, mired in legal trouble or bound by an NDA.

Dolled up in undiluted pinks, sequins, leopard prints, wigs, and other props, Kiki made naive any suppositions that may define her ethics through her ebullient aesthetics. In performance pieces like The Truth Booth: Art is the New Steal (2014), So You Think You Can Truth? (2016), #Teamkiki (For Institutional Use Only) (2018), Shop the Solidarity Collection (2018), and the Cold Reads and Hot Takes series (2022), Boult highlights with flair the many internal contradictions, systemic biases, emotionally manipulative dynamics, and skewed politics of the art world. Several of these performances were live and took the form of stand-up comedy roasts and slide-show presentations. As polemical a position as Kiki’s voice took, her delivery was invariably leavened by its satirical panache. Some of these presentations, like the Truth Booth series, were performed in her own curated fuchsia-adorned kiosks. Its aesthetics and intentions are in line with the DIY culture-jamming characteristic of the Guerrilla Girls’ earlier subversive interventions. They recall today’s clickbaity visuals, but Kiki deploys them to drive audiences’ attention to her hot takes. Referring to themselves as “Truthrz,” Kiki and her assisting facilitators take on the role of conspiracy theorists and, among their campaigning agenda, regale the public with theories about artists’ roles in enabling a neoliberal economy.

In conversation with Boult, she expresses her belief in Black conspiracy theorists, describing Wendy Williams as their north star and her signature on-air conjectures as based in reality. “A lot of what she talks about ends up coming out as true.” Beneath Kiki’s puckish guise as one of the Truthrz is an affinity toward a long history of radical Black skepticism to which Boult aligns with Williams. Black skepticism is an instinctive communal philosophy that stems from living under an oppressive state that often regards Black lives in negligible terms. For the Black skeptic, official truths are to be distrusted and never to be fully accepted at face value. As a survival mechanism and a form of self-empowerment, the Black skeptic critically speculates and seeks alternate narratives and truths. Boult, posing as a glammed-up conspiracy theorist, engages in an oppositional play against external domineering influence. Inherent in the Truth Booth series, So You Think You Can Truth, and several of Boult’s other performances is an itch to rupture the business-as-usual position of the cultural environment in which she is embroiled. This discontent drives her to challenge and hold the status quo in question.

Several of Boult’s performances over the years (including the aforementioned works) have taken place in various performance art festivals and settings like Hamilton’s highly attended Supercrawl, an outdoor art and cultural festival. In large part, the critically reflexive contents of her performances, even when she was a resident in Toronto, are a result of her roots as a Hamiltonian. Nicknamed ”The Hammer” for its preeminent steel industry past and the working class population, the city of Hamilton has been undergoing urban rebranding. This comes after decades of decay and disinvestment during its de-industrialization fade-out late in the previous century. The gentrification policies that have ensued incentivize private venture capitalists from Toronto and elsewhere to fill its economic void. This included driving out low-income residents from the once-affordable neighbourhoods and, in their stead, erecting smart condos, parking lots, and overpriced vegan restaurants. The new slogan, “Art is the New Steel,” emerged as part of attempts to attract businesses to the ever-ballooning art Supercrawl. The slogan and the urban redevelopment it references also became the title and subject of one of Kiki’s Truthrz canvassing brochures: Art is the New Steal: Appropriating the Hamilton Landscape (2016). During an event in conjunction with Supercrawl, Boult set up one of her embellished booths, offering the public what she called “The Myth of the Creative Class Grief Therapy,” her wry humour present as always. In the years that followed, Kiki would also perform her stand-up variety special, Hamilton is My Lady (2022), at the crawl on an elevated stage for hundreds. In her characteristic radiant pink, Kiki donned a cape-like outfit, resembling a comic-book hero tasked with entertaining the crowd while speaking truth to power. As she’s always done, her performances in this mixed crowd setting struck a delicate balance of poking at the very real effects of the city’s desperate attempts to become a hipster wonderland and the inherent absurdity in this. Each iteration of Hamilton is My Lady featured stage-design backdrops, backup dancers and singers, including a sing-a-long tune of the same name with a backing beat and a choreographed dance number. The whole production, like many of her performances and interventions, transcended the narrow conventions of contemporary art, aligning more with a category of Boult’s singular creativity.

Cuts from Hamilton is My Lady documentation spliced with archival Hamilton tourism video and clips of Kiki frolicking through her hometown come together in a mockumentary video installation included in Boult’s debut solo exhibition at Centre[3] For Artistic + Social Practice in Hamilton during the spring of 2024. It was surprising to learn that after a decade of steady activity in her practice, she was only now having a solo exhibition. It is another testament to Boult’s ability to circumnavigate established art world conventions and find possibilities elsewhere. The exhibition is also titled “Hamilton is My Lady,” which comes from a line borrowed from comedian and fellow Hamiltonian Martin Short’s 2012 comedy/musical special, I, Martin Short, Goes Home. The autobiographical mockumentary is the centrepiece of the artist’s crafted environment that gives the audience a primer on Kiki’s world. The gallery walls are, of course, pink, with custom velvety pink seating and life-size freestanding cardboard cuts of Kiki posing for us. A glowing sculptural piece in the form of a building archway reads “Kiki’s My Lady.” The design mimics the baroque architectural detail seen in the railing of the deserted mall Kiki shows us in the video as she galavants through her city. She poses and gestures in her best pink realtor power suit, giving us a tour. She inhales with pleasure, wryly taking in the kitschy grandeur of the mall, a local treasure clearly past its prime. There are parallels between Kiki and Hamilton; both are eager for validation. They try a bit too hard, and the failure to attain their ambitions earns them the common term of endearment: camp. Kiki most certainly loves her hometown more than it probably does in return. It’s little wonder that Kiki expresses this love by constantly poking fun and dishing it out to her. Whereas Lady Hamilton is often lost in her own reflection but doesn’t seem to be that self-aware, we have Kiki to remind her to snap out of it, despite the fact that Kiki has her own issues to deal with. 

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Luther Konadu is an artist based in Winnipeg, MB

This article is published in issue 41.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue