IT’S IN THE GAME ‘17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Protection(2017)

A video work by Sondra Perry built around her twin brother Sandy, a Division I college basketball player whose likeness the NCAA sold to EA Sports for its basketball games, without his knowledge or consent. Perry scrolls through the game's avatars while Sandy narrates memories of his old teammates. Interwoven is phone footage of the twins walking through the African, Oceanic and Americas galleries at the Met and the British Museum, hunting for objects displayed in vitrines. Spinning scans of museum artifacts, a slowed-down soul track and a chroma-key blue palette tie the two thefts together. The film sets the colonial logic of the museum beside the digital extraction of a Black athlete's body, and asks who owns a likeness once it has been rendered.