calendario eventi  :: 

X

12/4/2005

Candice Breitz

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

All Cut Up

“Candice Breitz is one of the most important artists to emerge from Africa in the 1990s. After Pascale Marthine Tayou, Kay Hassan, Kendell Geers and Barthélémy Toguo, the Palais de Tokyo will complete its panorama of the African continent with a show devoted to Breitz’s work. Symptomatic of the “postproduction” generation that happily practices pirating and sampling, Breitz’s art consists of reactivating images that have been seen somewhere along the media chain. Of all the artists active in this trend Breitz is certainly the most incisive and the most brutal. Like a DJ recreating her own piece from samplings, she takes those icons of today’s consumption, movie actors and the stars of soap operas, and mounts them in loops and series, projects them in repetitive cycles, or shows them in slow motion. ‘Soliloquy Trilogy’ might be described as what remains of a film once every effect has been cleared away. By running together end to end every sequence from ‘Basic Instinct’ in which Sharon Stone speaks a word or makes a sound, Breitz turns out a video that lasts only seven minutes, a real time that comes to poke holes in the movie’s time. In ‘Diorama’ Breitz uses the world-famous television series ‘Dallas’ as a universal language that one and all can draw on; she excerpts alarming monologues from the series, showing that the most familiar images can harbor unexpected elements.”

Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans

Popular culture and mass media

Candice Breitz shakes up visual conventions by mixing popular culture and mass media. Through reappropriation of images or language, she expands her personal discourse to a point where it assumes a universal dimension. The title of her show, “All Cut Up,” is in fact a reference to the “cut-up” technique invented by the writer and painter Brion Gysin in the 1950s, although it was used before that by the Dada movement (notably by Tristan Tzara) in an experimental fashion. In the summer of 1959 Gysin cut out newspaper articles and rearranged them to make a poem of his own composition. The approach was to eventually yield the collection “Minutes to Go.” It is this collage technique, which is widely used in the fine arts, that is behind Breitz’s work. Her pieces go from cut-and-paste video to a meticulous montage.

The artist thus offers a critical interpretation of the codes that are operating in mass culture, be it the television series “Dallas” or the film “Basic Instinct.” At the Palais de Tokyo Breitz is offering two works that reuse icons of film and television, the video installations “Soliloquy Trilogy” and “Diorama.” Both close to us and inaccessible, stars appear almost in intimate conversation with the viewer via the screen. The cinema/television dichotomy, moreover, is questioned in its relationship with space since the videos of “Diorama” will be seen on television screens whereas those making up the “Soliloquy Trilogy” will be shown on the giant screen of a veritable screening room. The entire exhibition is a telling reflection of our sound-and-image society.

Breitz, whose work is well known around the world and is part of many public and private international collections, sees herself as “a symptom of our age.” She uses her artmaking as a means of communication (“The creation of a video installation is both a translation and an original composition”) and defines her raw material as a lingua franca that can be understood by everyone everywhere. Her subjects are the characters and figures that each of us has access to, pop singers on MTV, formatted television series, Hollywood movies with mass appeal, and so on. Yet she empties them of all narrative, keeping only the precise instant that keeps her interest. Each actor is held frozen in that one instant, the same scene perhaps repeated indefinitely in a loop and the actor now following the indications of a new film director, Candice Breitz.

With the support of the Association des Amis du Palais de Tokyo.

Related to the exhibition :

A special evening with pointligneplan – Thursday 28 April at 8:30 p.m.
Along with Candice Breitz’s solo show, pointligneplan will join with the Palais de Tokyo for a special evening devoted to the artist’s video works:
- Presentation of a series of films followed by a discussion with Candice Breitz.
- Publication of an overview of the artist’s work by Pascal Beausse.

Program :
“Aiwa to Zen,” 2003, 11 minutes
“Soliloquy Trilogy,” 2000, 7 minutes, 14 minutes, and 7 minutes
“Becoming,” 2003, 34 minutes
“Mother and Father,” 2005, excerpts

For five years now, the collective pointligneplan has invited artists and filmmakers to present a work that displays a singular approach to images and storytelling. These works question a common imagination while marking out an expanded territory in which the idea of the medium of film moves and is mirrored.

Pavillon Exhibition - Starting Tuesday 24 May 2005

Candice Breitz, in residence in Paris for two months, has been invited to hold a workshop with the young artists participating in the Pavillon’s program. Following their work together, they will mount a collective show organized around the key themes of Breitz’s art: reviving, cannibalizing and reappropriating in art, in conjunction with her solo show at the Palais de Tokyo.

With the support of CityPlantes and CCAS.

Image: "Soliloquy" (Jack), 1987-2000

Opening: 13 april 2005, 20.00-00.00

Palais de Tokyo
13, avenue du President Wilson
Paris

stampa

permanent link