Babel

Blank Projects
113-115 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock
Cape Town 8001
South Africa

Candice Breitz
Babel Series

"The Babel Series consists of seven constantly stuttering DVD loops. Each steals a fragment of footage from the history of music video. The content of each video is relentlessly simple and literally monosyllabic: the seven different moments are appropriated from various pop performances (the line-up ranges from Madonna, Wham and Grace Jones to Queen, Prince, Abba and the Police). Each of the seven moments is then trapped in repetition as it is looped endlessly and noisily before the viewer on a series of television monitors. The seven loops play simultaneously in the space of the installation, creating a cacophonous babble that allegorically echoes the biblical story from which the work takes its title. What the seven videos have in common - beyond their reflection on narcissism and their deliberate choice of ambiguously-gendered stars - is that each evokes the primary building blocks of language. Together, the videos bang a millennial baby talk out of a series of dissonant beats,a baby talk that approaches sheer pandemonium."

The installation, on view through January 8, 2010 at Blank Projects is part of Dada South? an exhibition curated by Roger van Wyk & Kathryn Smith at the South African National Gallery.

Dada South? draws together a range of works by South African artists dating from the 1960s to the present, representing a range of avant-garde positions in the aftermath of Dada. South African art production is understood not simply as by-products of western avant-garde practices, but as drawing selectively and even randomly on these practices to articulate specific, local conditions. Through an eclectic collection of material, imaginary and intellectual work of our recent history, the exhibition proposes a review of the ambivalent relationship between cultural creation and political resistance."

[Text and graphic from Blank Projects website. Caption: "Candice Breitz, Babel Series, 1999, DVD Installation: 7 Looping DVDs, Installation view: O.K Center for Contemporary art, Linz. Photograph: Jason Mandella." Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]