Candice BreitzDigest, 2020
Candice Breitz’s ‘Digest’ is a large-scale conceptual installation commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 14 and later exhibited in full at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, before being presented at Goodman Gallery in London. The work reflects on the decline of analogue culture and the erasure of shared cinematic memory in the digital age. Through a meditation on obsolescence, Digest elegises the physicality of the videotape – a once ubiquitous medium of storytelling now largely lost to time and streaming platforms. Breitz reimagines the video library not as a space of access, but as a silent archive of sealed narratives, inviting reflection on how cultural content is consumed, preserved and forgotten.
The installation comprises 1,001 commercial VHS cassettes, each individually sealed in a clear polypropylene sleeve and displayed on wooden racks that recall the visual language of video rental stores. On the front of each sleeve, Breitz has silkscreened a single verb taken from the title of the original film, rendered in its corresponding font and colour scheme – phrases like to die, to escape, or to remember. Each word is then partially obscured beneath gestural sweeps of black acrylic paint, creating a tension between legibility and concealment. The tapes themselves remain inaccessible, transformed from active media into abstract, sculptural relics.
By referencing the mythology of Scheherazade’s thousand and one nights, Breitz subtly links the act of storytelling with survival, while also drawing attention to what happens when stories are no longer told. In ‘Digest’, the viewer is faced not with the content of the tapes, but with their absence – an archive in stasis. Made in the lead-up to and during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the work resonates with themes of suspended time, isolation and the disruption of cultural exchange. It poses quiet but urgent questions about the fate of collective memory and the future of how we hold, share and value our stories.
