Candice BreitzFebruary 2025
- Exhibition
From February to May, BPS22 is hosting Candice Breitz (ZAF, 1972) for her first solo exhibition in Belgium. The Johannesburg-native artist is taking over the entire museum with a series of works exploring how celebrity worship, the omnipresence of social media, and systems of white privilege are all used as tools competing to capture our attention.
Known for her multi-channel video installations and her photography, Candice Breitz works with the languages of mass culture to highlight the grip they have on our perception of reality and our empathy towards our peers. Through collage, editing, fragmentation, and appropriation, drawing heavily from the visual and auditory repertoire of so-called “popular” culture, she scrutinises how the media controls and competes with strategies to capture our attention in an information market that fetishises fame and feeds on entertainment. Her art thus evokes the dangers of misinformation at a time when our narratives are shaped by algorithms, paced by our clicks and comments on social media, and detached from the urgent realities of the world.
From her early collages (Ghost series, 1994-96) denouncing racial and gender stereotypes to her recent installation repurposing 1001 VHS cassette covers (Digest, 2019), including her mural on the struggles of a community of sex workers in Cape Town (TLDR, 2017), Candice Breitz creates works with sharp content, rooted in her South African origins and resonating globally. Her artistic, community, and collaborative productions engage in contemporary political debates (feminism, white supremacy, cultural industry capitalism, misinformation, etc.) and challenge media narratives. In an environment that prioritises celebrity over real experiences, who has the right to speak? Which voices are we willing to listen to in a media-saturated world? Does our need for entertainment hinder our ability to pay attention? Thus, the works gathered in her exhibition at BPS22 highlight the importance of storytelling in the construction of identities and lived reality, while also offering the possibility of alternative future realities.