CANDICE BREITZ

Since the mid 90s, Candice Breitz (1972) has explored the question of the construction of personal and collective identity. While her early works mainly focused on racial and sexual identity, the question of the impact of popular culture rapidly appeared as a dominant element in her practice. Breitz’s photos and video installations are based on methods which recall forms of montage employed in the domains of music and literature, such as cut-up and sampling.

Through the Monuments series of photographs, Candice Breitz is concerned more precisely with relations that link the fans to their idols. The large-format photographic portraits present “families” of fans, contacted through small ads and brought together by Breitz in Berlin to celebrate their respective idols: Marilyn Manson, Britney Spears, Abba, Iron Maiden and Grateful Dead.

The figure of the fan is a central element in Breitz’s production. As the artist points out, pop music, because it is a collective phenomenon, has progressively impregnated individual identity construction: “Pop music has become the soundtrack of our personal history.” The two projects presented here also throw light on the way the fans’ personalities oscillate between the staging of their own identity and its disappearance in a collective dynamic. This ambiguity between identity and otherness was echoed in the title of her exhibition in Mudam (26/04/2008 - 22/09/2008), Be My Somebody which was inspired by a Marilyn Manson song.

“During my first visit to Japan in 2002, I wrote down every Japanese word that I had to know before visiting Japan. The thin vocabulary of about 150 words that I managed to scrape together had to do almost exclusively with an exotic and imaginary Japan, or a consumable Japan… with eating Japanese food, Japan at war, Japanese pop culture, the Japanese art and fashion worlds, and, overwhelmingly, with dozens of Japanese brand names. I asked five Japanese-speakers to improvise a series of scenes from daily life, using my primitive foreigner’s Japanese.”
Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz :
Be my somebody
26/04/2008 - 22/09/2008

Aiwa to zen
14/03/2007 - 15/04/2007

www.candicebreitz.net