Candice Breitz: Extra! opens at the Iziko South African National Gallery this evening at 6pm. Having premiered at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg Extra! is the first comprehensive survey exhibition of this Berlin-based artist’s work ever to take place in her home country.
Candice Breitz: Extra! opens at the Iziko South African National Gallery this evening at 6pm. Having premiered at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg Extra! is the first comprehensive survey exhibition of this Berlin-based artist’s work ever to take place in her home country. Commissioned by Standard Bank, the exhibition presents a selection of existing works, including Breitz’ seminal works Mother + Father and FACTUM, as well as a new body of work which makes its international debut in Extra!. The latter, which shares the exhibition’s title, uses the scenography of the popular South African soap opera Generations to examine changing racial and economic dynamics in post-apartheid South Africa. The series, which is set in a small community of aspirant middle-class black South Africans, is screened in South Africa only in Nguni languages and has no white cast members in significant roles. It is within this context Breitz inserts her
own presence in reconstructed scenes of the series. The work comprises a large-scale video installation, made from video footage based on this concept of insertion and invasion. The title of the work suggests Breitz’s insignificance in the narrative of the scenes in which she appears: she is incidental to them, an “extra”, one step up from a prop.
The video installation is accompanied by a large selection of photographic stills from these scenes, showing the extent of her engagement with the soap opera and its cast.
In addition to these new works, Extra! includes a comprehensive installation of the 2010 work Factum,
a video installation for which Breitz found and interviewed several sets of identical twins. Also included in the show is Mother + Father (2005), a work which montages clips of fictional parental characters from famous Hollywood movies.
Born in South Africa in 1972, Breitz has been living and working in Berlin since 2002. She has recently signed with the Goodman Gallery as her commercial representative in South Africa.
