Candice BreitzLove Story, 2016
Candice Breitz’s ‘Love Story’, commissioned for the South African Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, is a powerful multi-channel video installation that interrogates the politics of empathy in a media-saturated world. The work explores how celebrity culture shapes our emotional engagement with global crises, contrasting the familiarity and visibility of well-known actors with the relative anonymity and marginalisation of real individuals whose lives have been shaped by displacement, violence and oppression. By foregrounding the tension between mediated compassion and lived experience, ‘Love Story’ raises urgent questions about who is heard, who is seen, and what it takes to elicit care.
The installation is presented across seven video channels, beginning with a dramatic montage in which actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin perform excerpts from the life stories of six individuals who have sought refuge under vastly different circumstances. Filmed against a green screen and delivered in fast-paced sequences, the celebrities give voice to testimonies drawn from interviews with a Syrian competitive swimmer, a former child soldier from Angola, a survivor from the Democratic Republic of Congo, an Indian transgender activist, a Venezuelan dissident, and a Somali atheist. In the second part of the installation, viewers encounter the full-length interviews with the original participants, each telling their story in their own words, voices and environments.
This structural shift – between the re-performances by globally recognised actors and the unmediated narratives of those directly affected – serves as a powerful metaphor for the mechanisms of attention and the ethics of representation. Breitz compels viewers to confront their own tendencies toward selective empathy and to consider how systems of privilege and visibility determine which stories are amplified and which remain unheard. ‘Love Story’ ultimately reveals how compassion is often contingent on familiarity, and challenges the viewer to engage with the lived experiences of others beyond the filters of celebrity and spectacle.
