The Character is the first major solo exhibition in Australia by internationally renowned South African artist Candice Breitz.

To what extent are our lives ‘scripted’ for us by the media we consume and other influences that we encounter in our intimate and social environments? Pop music, cinema and celebrity culture converge in the artist’s video installations to reflect on how we create, define and perform our identities in a world of mass media saturation.

Through inventively re-edited interviews, fan performances and montaged cinema sequences, Breitz’s works present a new take on contemporary portraiture by creating innovative narratives to probe and analyse individual experience.

Consumers of popular culture are much more literate than is generally assumed…The stories that consumers tell often have nothing to do with the illusions marketed to them.

- Candice Breitz

A major part of the exhibition will be the inclusion of The Woods, a new work making its international debut. Co-commissioned with the Peabody Essex Museum, Breitz’s new trilogy focuses on child performers and the performance of childhood to probe aspirations and promises embedded in mainstream cinema.

From adoring Michael Jackson fans re-performing the Thriller album, to indepth interviews with identical twins and studied re-performances of popular ‘rom-com’ scenes, Breitz playfully yet astutely investigates the extent to which our lives are constructed by parameters dictated to us by the media, society, and the particular moment in time that we are born into.