Johannesburg, South Africa, 1972.

Photographer. She earned a degree in fine arts from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1993. In 1995 she earned an art history degree from the University of Chicago in the US. In 1998 she earned a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in New York.

During her time in Berlin she was a professor of fine arts at the University of Braunschweig.

In 2007 she received the International Contemporary Art Award from the Prince Pierre Foundation in Monaco.

She has participated in exhibitions in Johannesburg, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Stockholm, Caracas, Cologne, Geneva and Milan.

In 2007 a monographic exhibit of Breitz’s work focused on her video installation was featured at MUSAC in León, Spain.

The Star-system of cinema, music, videoclips and the language of the media industry are the mains sources of inspiration for Candice Breitz’s work. She uses collages and video installations to express the connection between fiction and reality and she uses images extracted from the advertising and commercial film industries, manipulating them to express the duality of the human personality, altering the reality and modifying the essence of the original work. Breitz uses both anonymous people and famous stars in her work. This contrast between subjects who are “somebodies”, stars with public images who get a great deal of media attention and those who are “nobodies”, admirers and consumers of global pop culture, has been present in her work since the beginning of her career.

In her most recent work she uses video installations into which she incorporates materials from commercial films and advertising. She recreates and modifies them until the original essence is changed, converting them into new icons, alternative products to which she adds her own personal touch, changing the roles and reinterpreting the previous images, idealized by one that is more distant than the dreams they represent.

Her work reverses the roles so that those who are traditionally passive, i.e., the fans, consumers and spectators, become the protagonists, giving spectators the opportunity to play a more active role.

Candice Breitz’s work examines the inflexible fissures between culture and consumerism, between experience and language.

Over the last decade she has been exploring, translating, mixing and editing the codes and icons of the modern media culture and the language of the entertainment industry.

She currently lives and works in Berlin.