Subscribe to our newsletter for our must-see exhibitions, artists, events and more here
Shop William Kentridge Prints here

Extra #1

Candice Breitz
Extra #1, 2011
C-print
Work: 56 x 84 cm

Extra was shot on the set of Generations, South Africa’s most loved soap opera, and the most watched television programme on the African continent at the time the work was made. Broadcast since 1994, Generations paints a picture of the country’s emerging Black middle class against the backdrop of the media industry. Because much of the script is delivered in Nguni languages, white South Africans—who at this historical juncture rarely speak indigenous African languages—simply don’t fit into this aspirational landscape. As such, Generations does not include any major white characters in its cast. The shoot for Extra took place over a two-week period. Once each scene had been filmed for broadcast purposes, an extra take was captured, this time with Breitz visible on camera. Scene after scene, the artist inserts herself into the unfolding narrative; sometimes subtly, sometimes awkwardly and absurdly, always without easy explanation. Breitz’s performative interventions offer a grammar via which to consider the role of white South Africans in the post-apartheid context, providing a slew of gratingly uncomfortable visual metaphors which, over time, render visible the privileges that still very much attach to whiteness: Breitz’s ‘extra’ is less a character than an embodiment of white privilege, a figure mired in self-absorption and self-entitlement, a being that occupies more than its fair share of space and, in doing so, distracts from the labour—both fictional and actual—that is performed by the Black bodies around it (which become background to its presence). The disproportionate visibility of this mute white body, which greedily leverages attention for itself at the expense of the larger plot (and at the expense of the fictional community that it occupies), speaks to the violent insistence with which whiteness demands foreground.