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[20210622]
LOVE STORY by CANDICE BREITZ at PYLON-LAB [from 20210604 to 20210702]
[Photos: PYLON-Lab]
PYLON-Lab presents the solo-exhibition LOVE STORY by Candice Breitz, which is on view until July 2, 2021. The exhibition will feature the artist’s 7-channel video installation "Love Story" as well as Breitz's video series "Profile.
What kind of stories are we willing to hear? What kind of stories move us? Why is it that the same audiences that are driven to tears by fictional blockbusters, remain affectless in the face of actual human suffering?
"Love Story" (2016) interrogates the mechanics of identification and the conditions under which empathy is produced. The work is based on the personal narratives of six individuals who have fled their countries in response to a range of oppressive conditions.
The multi-channel installation evokes the global scale of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, evolving out of lengthy interviews conducted with the six participants in the countries where they are seeking or have been granted asylum (two interviews took place in Berlin, two in New York and two in Cape Town).
The personal accounts shared by the interviewees are articulated twice by "Love Story": In the first space of the installation, re-performed fragments from the six interviews are woven into a fast-paced montage featuring Hollywood actors Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. In a second space the original interviews unfold across six suspended screens in their full duration and complexity, now intimately voiced by the individuals whose lived experience they archive.
Suspending viewers between the gritty firsthand accounts of people who would typically remain nameless and faceless in the media, and an accessible drama featuring two actors who are the very embodiment of visibility, Love Story raises questions around how and where our attention in a media-saturated culture is focused.
In "Profile" - a work that was conceived and shot in Cape Town in early 2017, Breitz absents herself from visibility before the camera, instead platforming ten prominent South African artists who might equally have been nominated to represent the country. As their collective appearance usurps Breitz’s presence, the implied self-portrait gives way to a polyphonic riff, imploding the very assumptions that conventionally guarantee the genre of portraiture. “My name is Candice Breitz,” the cast of voices insists intermittently, punctuating descriptions of who those before the camera are (or might be): man or woman, white or black, working or middle class…. Veering erratically between descriptors of race, class and gender, occupation and national belonging, the verbal palate of attributes and markers delivered by the artists varies wildly in credibility. Who is here as a self and who is here as an other?
>>> www.pylon-hub.com/lab/project/love-story
Candice Breitz, “Love Story", 2016, Featuring Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore, 7-Channel Video Installation
Candice Breitz, “Profile", 2017, 3 single-channel videos, colour, sound, loop Variation A – Duration: 2 minutes, 20 seconds
[Text: Studio Candice Breitz]
©YYYYMMDD 2021 All content and design by Daniela Grabosch + Ricardo Almeida Roque unless otherwise stated. Images, Videos and Texts can only be used under permission of the author(s).