Breitz, Candice

South African, b.1972

Biography Candice Breitz creates photographs and video installations that interrogate the relationship between individual identity and the larger community as it is shaped by contemporary media and politics. She is interested in how popular culture impacts social dynamics and often places celebrities in her work as symbols of the privilege of visibility in relation to race, gender, and class. Research is central to her practice, and she carefully selects and rigorously analyzes her topics before creating her installations. “Any art reflects its times and what is going on at the time which it is made, preferably with a critical twist,” she said in a 2008 interview with New City Art.

The Matrix in the MoCP permanent collection, is a photograph of a placenta from one of the births shown in Breitz’s video installation Labour (2019). Labour was featured in the MoCP exhibition Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency as one of eight artists’ perspectives on the psychological, physical, and emotional realities surrounding fertility. The installation featured individual pods for viewing video footage in reverse of women during childbirth. Labour reflected the artist’s fantasy of a future in which women not only have full autonomy over their bodies, but they are also able to remove harmful members of humanity by absorbing them back into the womb.
Candice Breitz holds a BFA from University of Witwatersrand (Johannesburg), an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago, and a Master of Philosophy in Art History from Columbia University (1997). She was selected to represent South Africa at the 2017 Venice Biennale where she showed Profile (2017), a composite “self-portrait” which featured ten different South African artists introducing themselves as Breitz as a deconstruction of the reductive idea that a singular person can represent an entire nation or community. In 2022, Breitz completed The White Noise Trilogy, made up of a trio of video installations that critique whiteness and the production of empathy. Breitz has had solo exhibitions at National Gallery of Canada; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Museum Folkway, Essen, Germany; and many others. Her work is held permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; and various others.