Candice Breitz is a South African artist who works primarily in video and photography. Based in Berlin, she has been a professor of fine art at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007. But she took a break from Berlin to come speak about her pieces on display at the National Gallery of Canada, Sept. 12.
Her works in the gallery, entitled “Him + Her,” are large video installations set up in adjacent rooms. They show clips of famous actors which Breitz has edited to create entirely new narratives which explore identity and the fragility of the human psyche.
“I wanted to find a way of thinking about that kind of complexity of inner experience . . . and started by picking two actors, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, who I decided would be my every man and my every woman, hence the title of the piece which is ‘Him + Her,’” Breitz said.
“Things become real for us . . . as we find ourselves in those movies. I’m very interested in real and reel lives—that movement between fiction and daily experience is something which I come back to often in my work.”
Breitz said growing up in South Africa meant she came from a place where identity is violent. Differences were fetishized in dark ways, she said, and it was impossible for her to grow up if she didn’t have any form of political and social consciousness. She said this led her to obsess about questions of identity.
“Sometimes I think that is the reason, but I don’t know. I am waiting for someone else to figure it out,” she said.
A variety of other forces interested Breitz.
“I’ve kind of come to think over time that the media is some kind of infernal wrestling match with the traditional structure of parenthood in a sense that it is in a way our parents and sort of . . . shapes us and teaches us who we are,” she said.
She said one of her goals was to explore the psychology at the heart of mainstream cinema.
Breitz explained how she ended up with a non-narrative dialogue in an attempt to understand the portrayal of parenthood within the dominant context of main stream cinema.
“I tend to think of TV as vitrines . . . they house almost the vitrines of national history,” she said.
These vitrines—glass cabinets which are designed to hold expensive or important objects— showed history through Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine, Breitz said.
