Candice BreitzCandice Breitz: Extra!, 2012
Breitz’s work is innovative and challenging, pushing the boundaries to bring us smartly into the here and now, and pointing us towards the future. Her photographs and multi-channel video installations embrace sophisticated new technologies and reveal a probing fascination with mass media – soap operas, Hollywood films and music videos. Selecting snippets from these, from the interviews and interventions she films, Breitz edits and juxtaposes material to set up complex and often contradictory scenarios. Her works invite viewers to reflect critically on questions of identity; how it is that we become who we are, and how we are shaped through race, gender, class, family and the media. We, as a society, cannot move forward to a more equitable future until we have come to terms with our difficult past. Breitz’s Extra, the work from which the exhibition takes its title, was shot on the set of Generations, the popular South African soapie, and cuts thoughtfully to the core of debates about the place of white South Africans in a post-apartheid society.
