The art of emerging South African artist Candice Breitz draws from contemporary popular culture, developing new systems of understanding reality. Published in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli, this book documents Breitz's new work "Mother + Father".

Exploring the field of representation, Candice Breitz employs a variety of darkly humorous and often subversive techniques to attack stereotypes and visual conventions presented and accepted by the media and popular culture. Breitz reuses photographs and visual fragments and repositions them into bold, sometimes seemingly ugly images, which provocatively challenge conventional wisdom and accepted stereotypes.

Recognizing herself as a "symptom" of her era, Breitz has expressed her artistic practice by acting directly within the world of pop culture, opening up, deconstructing, and disrupting its apparent stability, and developing a form of creative intervention that transforms her from a silent spectator into an active, critical voice. The work "Mother + Father," designed specifically for Castello di Rivoli, represents one of her most complex projects to date.

The work is developed across two separate installations. The protagonists in the first installation, titled "Mother", are Hollywood actresses Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine. In "Father," the six paternal figures feature the familiar faces of actors Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voight. Suspended in a void made up only of words, facial expressions, and body language, these new interactions of the actors create the theatrical space of Breitz's work.

The digital likenesses, the mothers and fathers invented by the artist, are hostages, trapped within a specific emotional repertoire that challenges the rules by which the media — television and Hollywood — have taken on the role of parenthood, training the audience to experience, through the screen, situations that belong to real life. Candice Breitz has participated in numerous exhibitions such as Re-animations at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop at Tate Liverpool. She has been invited to participate in the Experience of Art exhibition at this year's Venice Biennale.