Candice BreitzTLDR, 2018
Candice Breitz’s ‘TLDR’ is a multi-channel video installation that critically examines the politics of visibility, representation and media attention in the digital age. Commissioned for the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt, the work was developed in close collaboration with SWEAT (Sex Workers Education & Advocacy Taskforce), a Cape Town-based organisation advocating for the rights of sex workers. As a conceptual counterpart to her earlier work’ Love Story’, ‘TLDR’ interrogates how marginalised voices are often drowned out or dismissed in favour of celebrity narratives and sensationalised media cycles, raising urgent questions about whose stories are heard and whose are silenced.
The installation unfolds in two connected spaces. In the first, a three-channel projection features a 12-year-old narrator, Xanny “The Future” Stevens, recounting a real-life controversy involving sex worker rights and the global feminist movement’s conflicted response to Amnesty International’s call for decriminalisation. Her monologue is interwoven with a theatrical chorus of SWEAT members dressed in coordinated costumes, holding emoji-inspired protest placards and engaging in stylised, choreographed gestures. The resulting environment blends protest performance, pop cultural references and narrative irony to critique the way serious political issues are often flattened into entertainment or dismissed as too complex for mainstream engagement.
In the second space, viewers encounter ten individual video monitors, each presenting extended interviews with the sex workers who appear in the chorus. These testimonies offer unfiltered insight into their daily lives, experiences of stigma, and the challenges they face in advocating for legal and social recognition. By shifting between stylised performance and direct address, ‘TLDR’ contrasts spectacle with substance and complicates the viewer’s relationship to both. Breitz uses this dual structure to reflect on her own position as a white, privileged artist, foregrounding the ethical tensions involved in mediating other people’s stories. In so doing, ‘TLDR’ becomes a compelling reflection on power, authorship and the responsibilities of cultural representation.
