Candice BreitzSweat, 2018
‘Sweat’ is a companion film to Candice Breitz’s thirteen-channel video installation ‘TLDR’. In this focused, single-channel work, ten Cape Town-based sex worker activists affiliated with SWEAT (the Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce) speak in their own words, offering short, sharply articulated reflections on their lives, labour, and advocacy. Each participant delivers a statement written to fit within the equivalent of ten tweets – no more than 1,400 characters – drawn from longer interviews filmed by Breitz in Cape Town in February 2017. The full interviews, offering deeper insight into each speaker’s experience, are available to view online.
With a running time of approximately 25 minutes, ‘Sweat’ can be presented as a single-channel video on a large monitor or projection, or as a ten-channel installation, where each speaker’s narrative plays on a dedicated screen in a continuous loop. The work’s flexible format reflects Breitz’s interest in how different spatial and temporal configurations shape the viewer’s attention and engagement. Whether encountered as a collective chorus or a series of individual monologues, ‘Sweat’ offers a direct, unmediated counterpoint to the stylised theatricality of ‘TLDR’, allowing the participants' voices to be heard without interruption or embellishment.
The featured speakers – Zoe Black, Connie, Duduzile Dlamini, Emmah, Gabbi, Regina High, Jenny, Jowi, Tenderlove, and Nosipho ‘Provocative’ Vidima – are not only narrators of their own lives but also political actors fighting for the decriminalisation and destigmatisation of sex work in South Africa. Conceived and produced in close collaboration with SWEAT, Sweat foregrounds the agency, eloquence and solidarity of a community too often spoken for or overlooked. Through its clarity and directness, the work amplifies the participants’ demand for recognition, rights, and respect on their own terms.
