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1/10/2004

Candice Breitz

Roger Bjorkholmen Galleri, Stockholm

The Babel Series, Diptychs
Videoinstallation

The Babel Diptychs, 1999
The four Babel Diptychs (three of which will be shown at Galleri Roger Björkholmen) belong to the larger Babel Series, a multi-channel installation that was shown for the first time at the Istanbul Biennale in 1999. The Babel Series has received international acclaim, and is best known as a series of seven constantly stuttering DVD loops, which have been installed in a number of venues, where they babble alongside each other cacophonously. The content of each loop is relentlessly simple and monosyllabic: the seven different moments are appropriated from various pop performances (the line-up ranges from Madonna, Wham and Grace Jones to Queen, Prince, Abba and the Police). Each of the seven moments is then trapped in repetition as it is looped endlessly and noisily before the viewer on a series of television monitors.

Together, the videos blast a cacophonous baby talk out of a series of dissonant beats, a baby talk that approaches sheer pandemonium. A small fragment appropriated from Madonna's song 'Papa Don't Preach,' has her moaning “Pa – Pa – Pa….” Another video has Freddie Mercury lamenting “Ma – Ma – Ma….” Elsewhere, George Michael whimpers “Me – Me – Me..,” while Grace Jones insists ‘No ' No – No….’ The 'odies of the performers are frozen in language, both automaton-like in their looped trances and at the same time peculiarly organic in their twitches and jerks. Language morphs and mutates into babble as repetition erodes sense and the possibility of communication. The pulsating bodies of the ambushed performers are opened to the projections of the audience as they somehow become vulnerable to the very viewers who would ordinarily be subject to the infantilizing spell of the pop hit. In its staging of primal language as always already tainted, the Babel Series alludes poignantly to the challenges facing subject formation in a world in which children often learn their first words by watching television or singing along to pop songs. The installation implies that the entry of the subject into language is inevitably inflected through the global media, restaging concrete poetry such that the utopian aspirations of earlier artists to universal language are jarringly displaced by the infernal universality of the media industry. The resulting discordant environment owes as much to the new poetics of Dada, Futurism and the Soviet avant-garde as it does to Andy Warhol and MTV.

The Babel Diptychs are less well known than the larger Babel Series installation, and Breitz has rarely exhibited them. In each of the four Babel Diptychs, two of the loops from the Babel Series are placed in a relatively minimal dialogue with each other. During Breitz's fourth one-person exhibition at Galleri Roger Björkholmen, we will be showing three Babel Diptychs:
DA/NO
DA/MA
YES/NO

The 'Babel Series' was exhibited for the first time at the 6th Istanbul Biennale (September 1999). It has subsequently been exhibited in the following locations: galleria francesca kaufmann (Milan), the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève (Geneva), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Galerie Art + Public (Geneva), the O.K Center for Contemporary Art Upper Austria (Linz), the Fondazione Teseco (Pisa), ZKM (Karlsruhe), De Appel Foundation (Amsterdam), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), the Palazzo Delle Papesse (Siena), and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela).

2/10 – 30/10
Vernisssage 2 oktober, 13-17 / Opening october 2, 1-5 pm

Roger Björkholmen Galleri
Karlavägen 24, 114 31 Stockholm

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