In 2000, Candice Breitz’s earliest video installation, Babel Series, was shown at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, with the support and encouragement of Paolo Colombo.

On the occasion of the Centre’s 40th anniversary, Breitz returns to talk about and screen excerpts from recent works, tracing her journey from the Babel Series (1999) to a recent dual-channel installation titled Treatment (2013), which will be exhibited at the Project Space in parallel to her presentation. Treatment enlists Breitz’s own parents and psychotherapist to recreate selected scenes from David Cronenberg’s film The Brood (1979), extending her exploration of the intertwinement of psychological and social being with popular culture, and reflecting in particular on the quasi-parental force exerted by cinematic images.

The Brood’s autobiographical script explores the emotional strain experienced by a couple as their marriage dissolves, and a custody battle for their five-year-old daughter Candice ensues. Himself fighting for custody of a daughter at the time of writing The Brood, Cronenberg has admitted that Samantha Eggar—the actress cast as Nola Carveth—“looked a little like my ex-wife,” while Art Hindle (the actor chosen to play her husband, Frank Carveth), in the director’s opinion, looked somewhat like himself. Having created—in the plot of The Brood—“a reasonable movie facsimile” of the harrowing situation he was facing in his own family life at the time, Cronenberg broods—throughout much of the unfolding narrative of the film—on a series of dysfunctional parent-child relationships. In a state of emotional distress following the collapse of her marriage, Nola Carveth effectively spends the film in treatment. Held in limbo in a fortressed clinic under the supervision of renegade psychotherapist Dr. Hal Raglan, Nola is both the daughter of an abusive mother and the mother of a daughter that she abuses, embodying Cronenberg’s interest in the self-perpetuating psychological horror that lies potential in family relationships.

Dr Raglan’s treatment involves intensive bouts of therapeutic role-play during which the doctor typically plays his patients’ abusive parents or maltreated children. For Treatment, Breitz isolates three such scenes from The Brood. Each of the scenes—now severed from the plot of the original film—invites us to voyeuristically observe a therapeutic exchange between Dr. Raglan and one of his patients. Stripped silent of the film’s original soundtrack, the scenes now receive their vocal content from the soundtrack of a second projection that can be viewed on the opposite wall of the gallery: set in a professional sound studio, the footage cuts between four individuals, each seated at a microphone and labouring to project his/her voice convincingly into the body of one of the actors appearing in original scenes.

The credits of the work reveal the identities of the dubbing team: the artist invited her psychotherapist Dr Renate Becker to synchronise the voice of Dr Raglan across all three scenes, while the voices of the three patients undergoing therapy are painstakingly recreated by the artist’s mother, father and the artist herself. Breitz’s move is consistent with Cronenberg’s view of cinema as a space in which to “rehearse the difficult things of life,” and points strongly to Breitz and Cronenberg’s shared interest in the overlap between cinematic- and psychological analysis.
Candice Breitz (1972, South Africa) lives and works in Berlin. She has been a tenured professor at the Braunschweig University of Art since 2007.