Prof. Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz discusses the making of her most recent work The Character, which was commissioned by EMAF Osnabrueck in the context of the travelling exhibition Moving Stories. As Breitz interviewed Bollywood's youngest stars for another project during a visit to Mumbai in late 2010, a very particular image of childhood started to emerge from their descriptions of the many roles that they had collectively played on the big screen. The Character was developed out of a workshop that Breitz lead with school children in suburban Mumbai in a quest to better grasp the role of fictional children in the context of the Hindi-language film industry. Her interviews with the children were eventually woven into a composite portrait of the child within the Bollywood imaginary. Breitz is currently working on a three-part installation that will be shot in Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood. Her talk will also briefly address the radical expansion of the cinematic 'mainstream' that is occurring as the unilateral dominance of American blockbusters is increasingly challenged by the Indian and Nigerian film industries.

See as well: The Character-installation in the exhibition

Candice Breitz was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1972. Since the mid-1990s, the Berlin-based South African artist has produced a body of work treating various aspects of the structure of identity and psychological identification. Candice Breitz has been a professor of fine art at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig since 2007. In recent years, solo exhibitions of her work have been hosted by, amongst others, the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin.