Candice Breitz

Esther Bejarano (1924–2021) survived Auschwitz because she was invited to join the camp’s Mädchenorchester (girls’ orchestra) as an accordionist. She had never played the instrument before. After the war, she emigrated to Palestine, witnessed the Nakba, and returned to Germany, where she later became an outspoken critic of Israel. Candice Breitz’s video traces Esther Bejarano’s legacy of defiance, reflecting on what it means today. Breitz combines episodes from Bejarano’s life with anecdotes from other “uncomfortable” Jewish voices that have met with public censure in contemporary Germany—including her own.

Candice Breitz (1972, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a video artist whose works question collective constructions of identity in the age of mass media, often with the means of ironic self-fashioning. Her works can be found in the collections of museums such as the Tate Modern, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Breitz recently completed the White Noise Trilogy, which includes her multichannel works Love Story (2016), TLDR (2017), and Whiteface (2022). She lives in Berlin.