Candice Breitz is a South African-born Jewish artist, moving image sculptor, public intellectual, and academic based in Berlin, Germany. Since 2007, she has held a tenured professorship in Fine Art (Video) at the Braunschweig University of Art (Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig). Her internationally exhibited conceptual work focuses on identity politics, the media representation of global displacement, and the social construction of collective memory. She represented South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017.
Born into a Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa, Breitz grew up during the final decades of the apartheid regime, a historical environment that shaped her later conceptual critique of structural oppression. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand, followed by a Master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University, New York. She also participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (ISP). In 2002, she relocated her primary residence and studio to Berlin, Germany.
Breitz’s artistic methodology relies on multi-channel video installations that unpack how individual identities are structured by mainstream media and geopolitical conditions. In her critical work Love Story (2017), she cast Hollywood actors (including Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin) to perform the verbatim personal testimonies of actual refugees fleeing conflict zones in Syria and the DRC, exposing the global hierarchy of empathy and the commodification of trauma within contemporary media.
In November 2023, the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken summarily canceled a major solo exhibition of Breitz’s work scheduled for 2024. The state-funded cultural institution released a public statement asserting that Breitz’s public remarks following October 7 failed to exhibit a sufficiently absolute condemnation of Hamas, declaring her public political stances incompatible with German institutional Staatsräson (State Reason).
Breitz formally rebutted the cancellation, publishing documentation showing her consistent condemnation of all violence targeting civilians, whether perpetrated by Hamas or the IDF. She characterized the administrative actions as a form of neo-McCarthyism, noting the paradox of non-Jewish German state officials censoring a Jewish artist over alleged lapses in historical memory. The event provoked a diplomatic protest from the South African Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, alongside international petitions signed by thousands of cultural figures.
She systematically challenged Berlin’s Senator for Culture, Joe Chialo, regarding the short-lived implementation of a mandatory administrative clause requiring artists to sign behavioral pledges to secure public funding. Breitz’s public defense and intellectual cross-examinations contributed to the widespread domestic resistance that forced the visual arts department to rescind the funding clause due to constitutional violations regarding freedom of artistic expression (Kunstfreiheit).