Candice Breitz
* 1972 Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives in Berlin.
Digest. 2019
Multi-channel video installation, wooden shelves, videotape, polypropylene boxes, paper, acrylic paint
300 units: 20.3 x 12 x 2.7 cm each
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
Courtesy of Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; and KOW, Berlin
About the work
Candice Breitz has spent the last twenty years reflecting on the impact of moving images within a variety of social and political contexts. For SB14, Breitz presents Digest (2019), a multi-channel video installation consisting of 300 videotapes that have been permanently interred and sealed within as many polypropylene boxes. Each of the boxes features a single verb drawn from the title of a film that was in circulation during the era of home video. Home video set in motion a revolution, anticipating a future in which moving images would be accessible, affordable and infinitely reproducible, and in which viewers would be able to freely tamper with and intervene in the continuity of the viewing experience, developments which pointed to the erosion of the collective viewing experience that cinema had offered. The moving image was clearly bound for a disembodied and virtual future, one that echoed the profound disembodiment that digital culture would bring to cultural consumption in general. Digest is accompanied by the following disclaimer:
This incomplete survey of the analogue intestines of home video is not titled Merda d'artista or Boite-en-valise. Despite its investment in strategies of Reversal and Retrospection, this mute depository comes both too early and too late to serve as a convincing Pense-Bete. These are neither the tales of Scheherazade nor the boxes of Pandora. These miniscule coffins are not Date Paintings or Time Capsules, nor are they adequate Surrogates for the moving images that they obscure. This Verb List is not a definitive Atlas. Nor is it an encyclopedia or compendium or index or library or collection or dictionary or inventory or archive or catalogue. Digest could not accurately be described as a monograph or a biopic or a catalogue raisonne. This is not art about art or about artists or about the art market. This is not a love song or a selfie.
Text from the Sharjah Biennial 14 Guidebook
© 2019 Sharjah Art Foundation
Gallery 5: A. Jaar, A. V. Janssens, C. Breitz. Making New Time, curated by Omar Kholeif. 7 March - 10 June 2019, UAE.