Candice Breitz

In her photography, video, and other artworks Candice Breitz uses popular imagery as a catalyst to expose the absurdity of how we construct meaning through stereotypes. Through humorous and subversive tactics Breitz strikes out at visual and narrative conventions in film and popular culture. To reveal the essence of our fascination with superstars, The Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), a three-screen video projection, juxtaposes clips of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and Jack Nicholson in The Witches Of Eastwick. Her video Aiwa to Zen (2003) will also be presented.

Candice Breitz
Born in Johannesbourg, South Africa, in 1972
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
www.candicebreitz.net

Exhibiting internationally since the mid-1990s, Candice Breitz has produced a substantial body of installation videos that examine stereotypes and visual conventions in film and popular culture. Her heavily edited videos often incorporate found-film segments. Clipping and reordering them, she produces new dialogue situations that speak of gender-based social and cultural stereotypes. For The Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), Breitz isolated a single protagonist from three different films by “cutting and pasting” every scene in which that protagonist speaks. The actors – Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry), Jack Nicholson (The Witches of Eastwick) and Sharon Stone (Basic Instinct) – are thereby made to deliver soliloquies that were never originally intended. This editing procedure dispenses with the storylines of the source films and forces the actors to speak directly to their viewers. The limited evolution of the actors’ roles throughout these edited films transforms the iconic Hollywood figures into stereotypes of themselves. In Aiwa to Zen (2003), Breitz tackled her own cultural biases. Prior to a visit to Japan, she listed the 150 Japanese words that she was familiar with. Once in Japan, she invited a small cast of Japanese actors to act out, employing only those words, sketches based on their daily lives.This very limited vocabulary was composed mainly of terms related to Japanese cuisine, consumer goods and pop culture. The resulting scenes, basically mimed stories devoid of any semiotic coherence, embody in oral terms the simplistic image of Japan that exists beyond its own borders and, as such, represent it as ultimately imagined by outsiders.