The Origins of Factum

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2009

The Origins of Factum
Candice Breitz

Presented in partnership with The Power Plant.

Candice Breitz: Same Same, an extensive and ambitious solo exhibition at the Power Plant and the artist’s first major North American survey, will begin during this year’s Festival. A few days before the opening, Future Projections presents a unique onstage conversation with Breitz to discuss the impact of cinema on her work and preview her latest commission.

Breitz’s art typically employs multiple monitors to create unique environments that evoke the history of portraiture, the nature of contemporary iconography, the phenomenon of fandom and the awesome cultural power of the cinematic apparatus. Him + Her, for example, recuts the performances of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep over several films into menacing narratives of control and breakdown, played out in multiple tableaux of image and sound. The Power Plant exhibition will feature a selection of multi-channel video works as well as a major new commission, Factum, and will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue.

Factum is a study of “the stereoscopic logic of identical twin relationships.” Breitz interviewed several pairs of identical twins on camera during the summer of 2009. The twins were invited to disclose as much or as little of the substance of their lives as they chose; private moments, memories and intimate recollections mingle and clash in revelatory ways. The result is a series of multiple-channel video installations in which twins vie with one another, their narrations at times identical and at times drastically different. The work gleefully conflates documentary with fiction, as Breitz’s shaping of already-distinct stories creates an uneasy narrative arc. “Factum,” writes Power Plant director Gregory Burke, “reflects on the relationship between the individual and the double, how one’s subjective integrity is both threatened and affirmed by the presence of a mirror image that can never be an exact duplicate. In this stubborn individuality—against all odds—Breitz finds evidence of personal agency and autonomy in history.”

Breitz’s talk and screening will focus on cinematic motivations for her journey into the world of identical twins, featuring clips from classics like Duck Soup and The Parent Trap, as well as Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and her principal film inspiration: Cronenberg’s infamous short Camera, created as a prelude for the Festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2000. She will also show clips from Factum.
—Noah Cowan