In order to consider the materiality of Victor Grippo’s artwork Energía de una papa (1972) more comprehensively than has thus far been the case, the specific characteristics of this case study are initially discussed against the background of the relationship between materiality and conceptual art. In a further step, the artwork’s agency is questioned, and it is regarded in the context of positions within new materialism. This is done by utilizing certain aspects of Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism” in an examination of Grippo’s artwork. Our thesis is that while the Baradian approach is able to explain materiality within the functioning of the case study, the complex embedding of materiality and symbolic factors for the context of the art require an even broader perspective. Finally, the different layers of materiality—the material presence and the immaterial, less tangible aspects—are considered together in order to show their indispensable entanglement in generating the artwork’s meaning. It is not just the potato as food-as-art-material or the voltameter as a ready-made that must be our focus, but all the organic, non-human materials and the non-tangible elements involved in the artistic work, as well as the human being who sets the process in motion.

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Summary: In her performance Black Off (2016‒), the South African performer Ntando Cele, masked as both “Bianca White” – a white-skinned woman with dyed platinum-blond hair, blue contact lenses and white gloves – and “Vera Black” – a black punk singer – addresses forms of racial discrimination and cultural identity based on her own experience as a South African in Europe. Two levels of un-masking are essential in Black Off. On the one hand it is metaphorical, because Cele deconstructs stereotypes and expectations and exposes the hidden racism in everyday life. On the other hand, it is literally about the un-masking of Bianca White and Vera Black as an aesthetic strategy, which involves an interplay between difference and appropriation. The act of un-masking offers performative potential to negotiate the issue of Black counter-representations.