Nine-channel video installation on monitors (color, sound), various furniture
12 min 5 sec (videos)
Overall dimensions variable
Commissioned by ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio


Diorama is a multi-channel video-installation incorporating nine monitors that are scattered casually in what feels like a familiar domestic environment. The installation alludes to a family television-room, conjuring up a cross-section of the intimate traumas of late twentieth-century suburban life. Each monitor is haunted by an archetypal character from the television series "Dallas, where the everyday was serialized as intrigue and the local seductively translated into the universal. The strange mixture of anticipation and amnesia constituting each week’s plot was to inspire future generations of soapies. Drawing on the assumption that those who experience this installation will be amongst the millions of viewers who experienced "Dallas" between 1978 and 1991, Breitz’s video environment presents itself as a diorama of our recent pasts. Played back simultaneously, the nine monitors in Diorama chant an exhausting catalogue of the daily dilemmas of late twentieth-century family life. The viewer is submerged in a litany of intimate traumas. Breitz offers critical interpretations of the codes and icons of mass culture, yet never loses sight of the private memories that are woven into cultural consumerism. In her work, ghosts from our recent consumer-pasts return to us like ex-lovers, goading us, and sparking in us a simultaneous fascination and disgust. – Jerome Sans


*1972 in Johannesburg, South Africa | Living and working in Berlin, Germany