Candice Breitz: Multiple Exposure

The MUSAC presents a monographic exhibition of the work of Candice Breitz. This survey of recent works made since 2000 will focus strongly on the artist’s multi-channel video installations. Breitz’s work addresses the complex relationship between culture and consumption, probing and dissecting the rocky chasms between reality and fiction, experience and language, identity and its representations. The exhibition’s curator Octavio Zaya describes Breitz’s work as a practice that ‘isolates the found footage that the artist often takes as her source, aggressively re-directing this footage against its characteristically narrative and anesthetic functions.” But Breitz’s interventions are not simply critical attacks on the products of mass entertainment: they also take seriously the significance that pop culture acquires for those who consume it and use it. The MUSAC is a project of the Government of Castilla y Leon operated by Fundacion Siglo.

Over the last decade, Candice Breitz has been translating, remixing and editing the codes and icons of contemporary media culture and the language of the entertainment industry. In early photographic montages, she explored the instability of identity and the violence of representation. The compelling video installations that grew out of the earlier photographic works, and which have become central to her practice, tend to strip down and interrogate found footage borrowed from mainstream cinema, television and music video. Breitz isolates and aggressively redirects this footage away from its characteristically narrative and anesthetic functions. The resulting works traverse a familiar yet puzzling and fragmentary terrain, rescinding the grammar and syntax of the borrowed material. On the one hand, Breitz’s media-scapes expose the machinery and tease out the values of the mainstream media industry. On the other, they reflect on the very real affect that pop culture is able to generate and sustain; projections and identifications that are more complex than they may at first seem.

Candice Breitz: Multiple Exposure The exhibition, produced by the MUSAC and curated by the critic and regular MUSAC collaborator Octavio Zaya, brings together for the first time a broad selection of the works (including Soliloquy Trilogy, Becoming and Mother + Father) that have established Candice Breitz as one of the central artistic figures of her generation. In one sense, the exhibition comprises examples of the many aspects embraced by Breitz’ work regarding these concepts in the global media space, and in another sense, it underlines the foundational importance of what this photographic procedure - multiple exposure - means in the language of Candice Breitz’ artistic practice. Through cut-ups and cropping, assembly and montage the artist re-exposes the found material by opening up the surface, the connections, joints and borders between the images/languages to reveal the construction of the representation and its ideology. As in karaoke and sampling, the original material is recycled, re-configured and altered, in Breitz’s case to gain access to a space that is critical about the use of images/languages as products of the increasingly dominant media industry and the methods and intentions concealed behind it.

Between original and re-production, visible and invisible, exposed and erased, presence and absence, familiar and strange, celebrity and anonymity, Candice Breitz weaves an artistic work supported by complex audio-visual installations. On one hand, its intricate technology enables that work to be staged as “psychodrama” where we project, with which we identify and in which we recognize our own subjectivity in the space of popular global consumer culture. On the other hand, it fragments and decomposes the relation of those media languages with the formation and construction of our identities, of our representations and of how we are perceived; the relation between who we are and how we imagine ourselves in the capitalist media universe; the way in which our representations and those of other cultures misrepresent and betray our desires and needs; the ways in which those needs and desires are mediated through filters such as MTV and CNN, Hollywood movies, etc.

The universe projected by Candice Breitz’s installations is the universe of the hyperreal. It is not an imitation or a copy, a duplicate or a parody. To paraphrase Baudrillard, it is the universe of substituting the signs of the real for the real. Candice Breitz, however, does not propose to analyze how those media construct the world in which we live, or the symptoms they create. Nor does she aim to establish a deconstructive criticism of those media or explore how those celebrities are made. Candice Breitz proposes to open, reveal and expose the simulacrum between reality and fiction, experience and language, identities and the media representing them, in this reality of ours that always promotes obsolescence, sameness and uniformity.

The publication: Candice Breitz: Multiple Exposure The exhibition is accompanied by a book by the same title, published by the MUSAC and ACTAR, whose editor is the curator of the show. In this publication, designed by Ralf Henning the essays by Octavio Zaya and Jessica Morgan (Curator of Contemporary Art at the Tate Modern, London) outline the most relevant productions of the career of this Berlin-based artist of South African origin.

Octavio Zaya, Biographical Note Born in the Canary Islands and based in New York since 1978, Octavio Zaya is an independent curator and art writer. Advisor of Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, MUSAC (León, Spain); part of the Permanent Artistic Advisory Board of Centro Huarte (Navarra, Spain); advisor of Perfoma (New York). He is co-director of Atlántica, a bilingual quarterly magazine of art and culture (published by CAAM, Canary Islands); belongs to the editorial board for NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art (Cornell University, New York) and is a US correspondent for Flash Art (Milan, Italy).

He was one of the curators of Documenta 11 (2002), as part of the curatorial team under the direction of Okwui Enwezor, and one of the curators of the 1st and 2nd Johannesburg Biennial (1995 and 1997). Other exhibitions he has curated include Interzones (Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 1996), In/Sight. African Photographers. 1940 to the Present (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997), The Garden of Forking Paths (Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, 1998), Interferencias (Canal de Isabel II, Madrid; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; Universidad de Salamanca, 1998) and “Eztetyka del Sueño” (with Carlos Basualdo, MNCARS, Madrid, 2001), one of the 5 exhibitions of Versiones del Sur, which he conceived and coordinated for Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. In 1997 he was the curator of "Latinoamérica in ARCO" and from 1998 to 2002 he was a curator of the International Project Rooms of the Madrid Art Fair, which he joined once again in 2006. He also curated solo exhibitions of Shirana Shabazi (2004) and Fernando Renes (2005) for TRANS>area, New York.

He was one of the curators of Fresh Cream (Phaidon Press, London, 2000) and originator and director of Files (MUSAC, León, 2004). Mr. Zaya has also authored numerous books and essays on contemporary and emerging issues and artists, including Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo-Qiang, Zelethu Mthethwa, Candice Breitz, Milagros de la Torre, Zhang Huan, Yutaka Sone, Juan Muñoz, Zarina Bhimji, Tania Bruguera, Barry McGee, Laura Lima, Rona Pondick, Damian Ortega, Fernanda Gomes, Carmela García, Bjarne Meelgard, William Eggleston, Shoja Azari, Gregory Green, Shahryar Nashat, Lovett & Codagnone, Slava Mogutin etc.

During 2005 Zaya presented several exhibitions, including After the Revolution (Contemporary Artists from Iran) (Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastian, 2005, and later traveling to Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 2006), Carmela García: The Hole in Space, curated for the Government of Canary Islands (CAAM, Gran Canaria, and Centro Juan Ismael, Fuerteventura, 2005), and Shirin Neshat: The Last Word (MUSAC, 2005 and CAAM, 2006). This summer organized Inside-Out: Contemporary Artists from Israel (MARCO, 2006) and he is currently curating an exhibition on the video works of Jesper and a large selection of the phographs by Ellen Kooi, both for La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain). In addition, Octavio Zaya is organizing as co-director, the 1st Biennial of Photography in Petach-Tikva, Israel and other exhibition projects for European institutions.

Candice Breitz: Multiple Exposure
Kurator: Octavio Zaya