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Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Digest, an exhibition featuring a recent body of work by Candice Breitz.

Digest is a multi-channel video installation that consists of 1,001 videotapes, which Breitz has permanently buried in polypropylene video sleeves. Each of the sleeves is emblazoned with a single verb excerpted from the title of a film that was in circulation during the era of home video, then painstakingly coated in black acrylic abstraction. The verb, 'to die', for instance, is sourced from the VHS cover for Die Hard (1988), while 'to do' is cited from the VHS cover for Do The Right Thing (1989). In each case, the Digest verb faithfully appropriates and reproduces the font that was used on the original VHS cover. The resulting coffin-like paintings are arranged on shallow wooden racks, evoking the display aesthetics of video rental stores. Inspired by the legendary storyteller Scheherezade, whose ability to generate narrative suspense guaranteed her survival for 1,001 nights, Digest hoards kilometres of unseen videotape in a monumental archive that serves to commemorate a now obsolescent medium. The content carried on the concealed videocassettes will remain forever unrevealed. Suspended between the analogue and the digital, Digest celebrates the idiosyncrasy of human gesture at a moment when both idiosyncrasy and human gesture are at risk of digitally-inflicted extinction.

First debuted on the Sharjah Biennial in 2019, Digest was recently shown full-scale at the Akademie Der Künste in Berlin for the first time, to mark the installation’s completion in 2020.

More about Digest here

Read: Never Ending Stories, Interview with Nora V. Scouri, Journal der Künste