Candice BreitzA History of White People, 1934-2020 Excerpted from the Digest Archive, 1934-2020, 1934-2020
‘A History of White People, 1934–2020’ is a discrete sculptural work drawn from Candice Breitz’s larger ‘Digest’ installation, a project that commemorates the analogue era of home video while meditating on the shifting nature of embodied subjectivity in the digital age. Comprising five silenced videotapes, each sealed in transparent sleeves and mounted on shallow wooden racks reminiscent of video rental displays, this work distills a violent and enduring legacy into a restrained visual form. The selected verbs – to capture, to divide, to conquer, to control, to possess – are drawn from film titles once in circulation during the height of the home video era. Removed from their original narrative contexts, they are reassembled here into a minimalist script that evokes centuries of colonial, imperial and racial domination.
Breitz’s choice of language speaks not to cinematic action, but to historical practices and systemic behaviours enacted by those in power. These five verbs, arranged without ornamentation, evoke the mechanisms through which white subjectivity has asserted and maintained dominance across time. As part of a limited number of smaller works conceived alongside ‘Digest’, this work reflects the artist’s intent to extract and reframe individual elements from the larger archive to propose open-ended yet pointed narratives. In Breitz’s words, these verbs are “the things that white people have done and continue to do.” Presented as buried content – sealed, silenced and abstracted – the tapes resist consumption, instead asking viewers to confront the legacy of power inscribed not in images, but in the language of action.
