Mother

In today's media society, perception is often influenced by images from the (mass) media. Television and film images have a formative influence on cultural memory, Hollywood stars and TV-celebrities are the new role models in an expansive media culture. Candice Breitz's six-channel installation Mother addresses the meaning of mass media images and critically questions clichés perpetuated by the entertainment industry. Well-known Hollywood movies provide the source material which the artist has digitally reworked and rearranged according to her own script, thereby situating it in a new context.

On each of the six monitors a famous American actress is shown playing the role of a mother, mother-figures from different generations varying in character, embodied by women as diverse as Meryl Streep, Shirley McLaine, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Diane Keaton and Faye Dunaway. The characters are extracted from the context of the original movie and are made to appear as isolated figures on a black background. Their respective partners are missing from the original screen dialogues, so that the characters' emotional reactions become almost incomprehensible. Nonetheless a vivid atmosphere is created, in which the women relate to each other through their being mothers and seem to interact.

Sampling is no longer just a digital technology; it has become part of our life-style. Using Found Footage, pre-existent images and sounds, Breitz points to the images themselves as products of an increasingly dominant media industry. The deconstruction that Breitz works with her recycling of images enables a critical access to the use of images in the media and the motives and methods that lie behind it.

Along with the installation, Candice Breitz and the Edith Russ Site for Media Art for the first time present the newly created photographic score One Minute of Mother (2005). Stills taken from the video-installation, which has a running time of approximately 13 minutes, are arranged into a large-scale photo installation. They are lined up to create an abstract representation of the rhythmic and narrative structure of the filmic material, so that something akin to a musical score of the flow of images and sounds of the installation emerges.

Candice Breitz, born 1972, has grown up in South Africa and now lives in Berlin. She studied Art and Art History in Johannesburg, Chicago and New York. Her work has been presented in numerous international exhibitions and she has participated in many major Biennales like Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Istanbul, Kwangju, Taipei and Venice. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre d'Art contemporain, Geneva; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; FACT, Liverpool; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Castello di Rivoli, Turin. Her work has already been on display at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art in 2002 as part of the exhibition Total überzogen.