Candice Breitz: Extra! - the first comprehensive survey exhibition of the artist’s
work to be presented in South Africa - runs at the Standard Bank Gallery in partnership
with the Goethe-Institut and Goodman Gallery from 8 February until 5 April, 2012.
Breitz, who was born in Johannesburg but now lives and works in Berlin, is an internationally
renowned artist who has exhibited her photographs and video installations worldwide.
Breitz’s exhibition derives its title from her new work Extra (2011), a single-channel
video as well as a series of photographs created on the set of the popular local
soap opera, Generations. Breitz inserts herself into a number of actual scenes from
the soap, sometimes subtly, sometimes awkwardly and absurdly, but always without
judgement or easy explanation. Here she resonates as a conspicuously white presence
amongst an otherwise black cast. The resulting images are simultaneously thought
provoking and uncomfortably amusing - implicitly raising questions about what it
might mean to be white in the context of the new South Africa, without offering
easy answers. Extra was specially commissioned by the Standard Bank of South Africa
and is being shown for the first time in this exhibition.
The second video installation in the exhibition is similarly concerned with questions
around identity and self-formation. Factum (2010) is a series of dual-channel installations,
each of which juxtaposes the testimonies of a pair of identical twins, whom Breitz
interviewed individually at length.
The third work on this exhibition, Mother + Father (2005), is a pair of video installations
that features a selection of fictional parental characters drawn from popular cinema.
In each case, Breitz’s edit weaves carefully selected snippets of footage drawn
from a variety of films into a new dialogue that probes parental stereotypes, and
at the same time explores the formative power of mainstream entertainment.