At the Venice Biennale, people can find the South African pavilion. The pavilion contains works by two artists: Mohau Modisakeng and Candice Breitz. Candice Breitz’s Love Story is a two room video installation that is centered around refugee stories. Candice Breitz recorded interviews with refugees, collecting several interviews that were each several hours in length.

For the first room, Breitz set up two screens, where one shows Alec Baldwin and the other shows Julianne Moore. The room is dark and wide, and the screens are large. The camera shows the actors sitting on a chair in front of a green screen. The actors are narrating the stories of the refugees, as if they were the refugees themselves, moving through stories without transitions. The next room shows the individual interviews at full length. In an interview with InterviewsMagazine, Breitz says:

“I wanted Alec and Julianne to almost bait you into a relationship with the stories to invite you to consider the distance between the stories as Alec and Julianne tell them, and the remoteness of having to hear that same set of six stories now relayed to you at a slower pace, in less-perfect English, certainly less entertainingly.”

Breitz wanted to embody the stories in individuals that represented qualities of privilege valued in modern society. Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin are celebrities, “extraordinarily white, extraordinarily successful,” and known. The stories are narrated by individuals that are thought to be entertaining and successful individuals, which is clearly marked in the narration. Alec Baldwin is often narrating the stories in a deep, gravely voice. He slows down his pace to emphasize moments of desperation. While he does this, he puts sunglasses on and off, which adds to the dramatic effects. The green screen and the director’s chair makes the entire environment look very cinematic. The stories as a result often become comedic, sustaining a sense of disconnect between the viewer and the narrations.

The result is a narration that hardly invokes any sense of empathy or sympathy. In an iconic scene with Julianne Moore, Moore breaks out of character and asks the people around her: “should I say it this way, or should I say it this way?” This makes a drastic contrast with the narrations of the actual interviewees. The narrations of the actual interviewees contain breaks, hesitant english, and repeated words, which, as Breitz says, are “details that a polished Hollywood script would have edited out. They never would have made it to the big screen with that kind of grittiness.”

The work seems to comment on media, what it chooses to convey to greater masses, and how it chooses to convey information to greater masses. The room with the super actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin seems to convey that media condenses information, represented in the way they condensed the refugee stories into a single narrative. In the process, information about the actual stories are lost, and it becomes harder to understand and see what pains and struggles the refugees undergo. The super actors also seek to integrate an element of entertainment, which seems to resonate with modern news media sources. Often news sources use dramatic music, or cinematic voicing, or flashing red words to dramatize the news they are conveying. The element of entertainment takes away from the possibility of connecting with the refugees and their stories.

In addition, Breitz argues that this raises questions on individuality: who gets the right to convey these stories? Ironically, the conveyors tend to be very different from the actual original story tellers. As mentioned above, the conveyors embody qualities of privilege. Candice brings our focus to who is conveying information in our modern society, and how information is conveyed.

Collectively the video works in Love Story show the immense obstacle in trying to connect with stories in mass media. It is difficult to gain an empathetic connection when the stories are catered to entertainment, cinematized, and lacking of how they would actually be told. The second room in Breitz’s installation provides a different method for conveying the information about the refugees. Showing the raw interviews on an individual screen allowed the stories provide all the qualities that are dusted away in cinematized productions. The productions show how the refugee crisis is large and involves a diverse group of people. It is not localized to a single narrative or country, which speaks to the scale of the crisis, something that was far from evident in the portrayal with the actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin.

The refugees Breitz interviewed are: Farah Abdi Mohamed, a Somali man; Sarah Ezzat Mardini, a syrian long distance swimmer; Luis Ernesto Nava Molero, a Venezuelan man, Shabeena Francis Saveri, a trans woman from Mumbai; Jose Maria Jao, a former child soldier; Mamy Maloba Langa, a woman from Congo. Each interview is several hours long, so it is impossible to see the extent of each interview within a few hours at the installation.

I will write out a blurb on Mohau Modisakeng’s Passage on a different blog post!

Here is the interview with Candice Breitz from Interview Magazines: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/candice-breitz#_

Also, I unfortunatly don’t have images of the pavilion. So I will insert an image from the South African Pavilion’s website to give viewers a sense of what i’m talking about!