Candice Breitz
dal 18/10/2013 al 29/11/2013
Segnalato da
18/10/2013
Candice Breitz
Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Los Angeles
The Woods. Breitz creates video installations and photographic works that engage a unique relationship between minimalist strategy and pop ideology in response to a culture that is increasingly saturated by digital images.
Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition by the celebrated artist
Candice Breitz, to open on October 19, 2013. The occasion will mark her first exhibition with the
gallery, as well as the American premiere of her most recent work, the video trilogy The Woods
(2012), commissioned by the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA) and the Australian Centre
for the Moving Image (Melbourne).
Breitz creates video installations and photographic works that engage a unique relationship
between minimalist strategy and pop ideology in response to a culture that is increasingly
saturated by digital images that generate and perpetuate a fairly limited set of aspirations. By
fragmenting and reconfiguring content derived from popular film and music and re-presenting it
in a series of challenging installations, Breitz creates a space in which viewers are invited to draw
their own conclusions with regard to the ways in which mass media impact on and script
contemporary life.
Throughout her career, Breitz has worked extensively with footage drawn from Hollywood
movies, creating works that point to the inextricable relationship between the language of popular
culture and the molding of identity in our contemporary world. For the first time in her career,
Breitz casts professional working actors as her subjects in The Woods. The video-based trilogy
dynamically examines the world of the child performer and the performance of childhood, taking
the mainstream cinema cultures of three continents as its point of departure.
The Woods encompasses installations filmed in three of the world’s leading centers of film
production – Hollywood (Los Angeles, USA), Bollywood (Mumbai, India) and Nollywood (Lagos,
Nigeria). Two of the three installations that make up the trilogy – The Audition (filmed in Los
Angeles) and The Rehearsal (filmed in Mumbai) – present aspiring and working child actors,
situating them in scenarios in which they ventriloquize voices and personae that would typically
belong to adults. The third installation, The Interview (filmed in Lagos), features two adult actors
who are best known on the African continent for their portrayal of child characters, and mimics
the format of a conventional celebrity interview. As suggested by their titles, The Audition, The
Rehearsal and The Interview zoom in on generally unseen show business rituals, which
collectively become the loci of meaning through which Breitz reflects on and decodes the myth-
making machinery of mainstream cinema.
Candice Breitz (b. 1972, Johannesburg) lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been the subject
of numerous exhibitions at international institutions including the Louisiana Museum of Modern
Art (Humlebaek), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Newcastle), De Appel (Amsterdam), the
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Temporäre
Kunsthalle Berlin, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), Pinchuk Art Centre (Kyiv),
Modern Art Oxford, The Power Plant (Toronto), Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria), White Cube
(London), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and the South African
National Gallery (Cape Town). Her work is represented in the collections of New York's MoMA
and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the
Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Art Gallery of Ontario
(Toronto), Fonds national d’art contemporain (France), the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Humlebaek), among other institutions. Breitz has participated
in festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival (New Frontier, 2009) and the Toronto
International Film Festival (2013). She is a tenured professor at the Braunschweig University of
Art in Germany.
Image: The Interview, 2012 / From the trilogy The Woods
Shot at Wheatbaker Hotel, Lagos, Nigeria: June 2012
Two-channel Installation
Commissioned by ACMI (Melbourne) + PEM (Salem)
Installation View, ACMI (Melbourne)
Opening Reception: October 19, 6 – 8 PM
Gallery Contact
Angela Yang t: (323) 464-1097 E: angelayang@perryrubenstein.com
Katie Schultheis katieschultheis@perryrubenstein.com
Perry Rubenstein Gallery
1215 N. Highland Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90038
Gallery Hours: 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM, Tuesday-Saturday