Candice Breitz has been exhibiting internationally since 1996, when she first gained wide recognition for the 'Rainbow Series', a group of photomontages that combines fragments of black and white bodies to explore the instability of identity and the violence of representation. In subsequent years, Breitz has again and again chosen to translate images that she has isolated from the existing cultural and media landscape. Found images and extracts of footage – from National Geographic to Hustler, from Hollywood movies to MTV – are momentarily cut away from their usual environments, then concisely edited and reconfigured. Complex questions of identity formation and representation are at the core of the earlier photographic works, leading to the more recent video installations which increasingly pursue Breitz's interest in what she has called 'the scripted life', and in which she turns her editing impulses towards critical interpretations of the codes and icons of pop culture and the entertainment industry.

Breitz's work effectively re-introduces us to familiar movies, pop stars and love songs, inviting the viewer to revisit terrain in which public and private memory implode into one another. Photographic excerpts, filmic sequences and linguistic moments are extracted from the confines of linear narrative and predictability, then reassembled such that they now offer themselves to the viewer as filters through which to reconsider the context from which they were originally captured. Speech is cut up into split-second syllables and sentences are sucked out of dialogues, pushing language to the edge of comprehensibility. Multi-channel installations like the 'Babel Series' and 'Karaoke' poignantly dramatize the extent to which we are formed by the language that mediates and maps our daily experience, evoking the fundamental and sometimes ominous ways in which the vocabulary of the mainstream media determines and regulates our relationships to each other and to ourselves. Whether the incisions that Breitz makes as she dissects the world are enacted literally with a scalpel and glue, or with the help of digital software, the chosen material is dismantled according to a conceptual logic that seeks to avoid the expressive gesturalism that is often associated with creative work. Her working process can be located, rather, somewhere between the cutting operations of the editor, the translator, the composer and the horticulturist. The works of art that result from this process can then be thought of as autopsies, as offshoots, as translations, or as sequels. In alienating and re-composing familiar cultural codes, the artist's cuttings open onto spaces of experience and reading that are not easily available to us in our daily consumption of affirmative cultural signs. Breitz's obsessive splicing leaves visual and verbal language suspended somewhere between Esperanto and Babel, the implicit suggestion being that the viewer must make the ultimate translation.

– Martin Sturm