Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz
TLDR, 2017
13-Channel Video Installation (Room A: Three-Channel Projection, 6΄ loop | Room B: 10 Interviews on Monitors 12 hrs, loop)
Commissioned by the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt am Main
Courtesy of the artist

 

TLDR grew out of a series of interviews and workshops Candice Breitz held in Cape Town with a community of sex workers, affiliated with the Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT). The work comprises two rooms. In the first, 12-year-old Xanny Stevens recounts, with the disarming frankness of a child, a true story that underscores the life-and-death stakes motivating the international struggle of sex workers for basic human rights. The story from the recent past, vividly evokes an ideological battle that pitted feminists against feminists, and human rights organisation Amnesty International against an awkward coalition of prominent Hollywood actresses and sex work abolitionists. A chorus of sex workers responds to his story with slogans drawn from the archives of sex work advocacy. Costumed in a shade of orange that is the signature colour of SWEAT (but also of the uniforms worn by convicted offenders in South African prisons), the collective articulates its calls for the decriminalisation and de-stigmatisation of sex work. The soundtrack bounces between improvisatory performances of protest songs sung predominantly in Zulu and Xhosa, and pithy sound samples derived from popular hits (from Tina Turner to Rihanna, from Roy Orbison to Donna Summer). In the second room, visitors can hear first-person testimonies by the sex workers describing their labour and articulating their shared goals as activists. TLDR invites reflection on the relationship between whiteness, privilege and visibility; it also addresses the relationship between art and activism and asks whether and how artists living privileged lives can succeed in amplifying calls for social justice and meaningfully representing marginalised communities.

 

Candice Breitz’ moving image works explore the dynamics by means of which an individual becomes him or herself in relation to a larger community, be that the immediate community that one encounters in family, or the real and imagined communities that are shaped not only by questions of national belonging, race, gender and religion, but also by the increasingly undeniable influence of mainstream media such as television, cinema and other popular culture.

https://www.candicebreitz.net/

 

 

ALL ARTISTS

EMST NEWSLETTER                 SUBSCRIBE
Hellenic Ministry of Culture
EL / EN