Candice Breitz Exhibition: Extra!

Event Date: 8 February - 5 April 2012

Published by Business and Arts South Africa

Candice Breitz Exhibition: Extra!

Candice Breitz: Extra! exhibition is due to open at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg on February 8.

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.

The show - the first comprehensive survey exhibition of the artist’s work to be presented in South Africa – is presented by Standard Bank in partnership with the Goethe-Institut and Goodman Gallery. It runs until 5 April, 2012.

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 soap opera, Generations. Broadcast on SABC 1 since 1994, Generations, South Africa’s most loved soap and the most watched television programme on the African continent, seeks to paint a picture of the country’s emerging black middle class against the backdrop of the media industry. Generations does not include any major white characters in its cast: because much of the script is delivered in Nguni languages, white South Africans - who at this historical juncture rarely speak indigenous African languages - simply don’t fit into this aspirational landscape.

In Extra, Breitz inserts herself into a number of actual scenes from Generations, 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.

Candice Breitz: Extra! runs at the Standard Bank Gallery, corner of Simmonds and Frederick Streets, Johannesburg, from 8 February – 5 April 2012. The Gallery (Tel: 011 631 4467) is open Mondays to Fridays, 08:00-16:30; on Saturdays, 09:00-13:00; and is closed on Sundays and public holidays. Admission is free. www.standardbankarts.co.za

Notes to Editors:

About Candice Breitz

Since the mid-1990s, Candice Breitz has produced a body of work reflecting on various aspects of the structure of identity and psychological identification. In her early photographic work, made shortly after she left South Africa, Breitz used montage and found imagery to thematise the ways in which racial and sexual identity had come to be pictured in apartheid South Africa, within visual contexts ranging from tourist postcards to pornography.

Since 1999, Breitz has predominantly created multi-channel video installations, in which she often explores the relationship between individuals and social bodies. Central to her work is the question of how an individual becomes him- or herself in relation to a larger community, be that community the immediate community that one encounters in family, or the real and imagined communities that are shaped not only by questions of national belonging, race, gender and class; but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and popular music.

Breitz holds degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Chicago and Columbia University (New York), and has also participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Studies Programme (1996-1997). She has held solo exhibitions of her work at the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010); White Cube, London (2010); The Power Plant, Toronto (2009); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2008); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2005); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2004); Modern Art Oxford (2003); De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (2001); and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2000). She has also participated in biennales in Johannesburg (1 995, 1997); São Paulo (1998); Istanbul (1999); Kwangju (2000); Taipei (2000); Venice (2005) and Singapore (2011).

Breitz has been a tenured Professor of Fine Art at the Braunschweig University of Art in Germany since 2007.

Selected works (HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGES AVAILABLE ON REQUEST)

Candice Breitz, Extra #1, 2011. Chromogenic print. 56 x 84 cm. Commissioned by the Standard Bank of South Africa, Johannesburg.

Candice Breitz, Extra #13, 2011. Chromogenic print. 56 x 84 cm. Commissioned by the Standard Bank of South Africa, Johannesburg

Candice Breitz, Stills from Father, 2005. Six-Channel Installation: 6 Hard Drives, Duration: 11 minutes. Courtesy: Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), Kaufmann Repetto (Milan) + White Cube (London).

Candice Breitz, Stills from Mother, 2005. Six-Channel Installation: 6 Hard Drives, Duration: 13 minutes, 15 seconds. Courtesy: Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), Kaufmann Repetto (Milan) + White Cube (London).

Candice Breitz, Stills from Factum Kang, 2009. Dual-Channel Installation: 2 Hard Drives, Duration: 69 minutes, 10 seconds. Commissioned by The Power Plant, Toronto. Courtesy: Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg), Kaufmann Repetto (Milan) + White Cube (London).

About the Standard Bank Gallery

The Standard Bank Gallery is an exciting exhibition space situated in the heart of downtown Johannesburg. Since it opened in 1990, it has become one of the city's foremost fine art venues. It offers a dynamic exhibition programme, in keeping with its aim of promoting South African art and enhancing the Standard Bank's image as an institution that cares about cultural development, and is operated on a non-commercial basis. Each year the gallery shows works by the cream of the local art world. One of its most popular events is the annual exhibition by the incumbent winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year Award. The gallery has excellent acoustics and regularly hosts concerts and recitals. Guided tours of exhibitions for school groups form part of the bank's outreach programme.