Candice BreitzEx Libris South Africa, 2009
Candice Breitz is a Berlin-based artist whose practice investigates the politics of representation, authorship and visibility. Working across moving image, installation and sculpture, she often draws attention to systems of cultural production and the voices they amplify – or exclude. Her work frequently engages with the intersection of personal testimony and collective narrative, examining how identity is constructed and performed within the structures of media, language and power.
‘Ex Libris South Africa’ is a sculptural work rooted in an act of casual discovery. In January 2009, Breitz came across a single dusty and neglected bookshelf in Bikini Beach Books, a second-hand bookshop in Gordon’s Bay, South Africa. The shelf held a disparate collection of books that, while unrelated in subject matter, shared a common geography and reflected the prevailing ideas and concerns circulating in South Africa over the course of nearly a century. The titles speak volumes – charting a broad spectrum of hopes, fears, prejudices and projections that, together, form a portrait of a society wrestling with its own complexity.
Since 2009, the shelf has hung in Breitz’s studio, quietly occupying space as both object and archive. ‘Ex Libris South Africa’ offers a sculptural snapshot of the ideological landscape preserved in the everyday ephemera of cultural life. The work invites reflection on how belief systems take shape not only through official discourse, but also through the books we publish, purchase and discard. It draws attention to the silent authority of printed matter and how even the most unassuming bookshelf can become a mirror of national consciousness.
