In 2003, Candice Breitz invited visitors to the KOW gallery in Berlin-Mitte to witness a series of re-enactments. Breitz (born in Johannesburg in 1972) is a Berlin-based artist whose multichannel moving image installations have been shown internationally since 1994. She works within the found footage tradition, restaging and editing objects of popular culture and mass media. This rich archive includes news reels, music videos and crucially, Hollywood films. The new installation, Becoming, saw the artist occupy the roles of seven actresses (Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Meg Ryan, Neve Campbell, Reese Witherspoon and Drew Barrymore). Breitz carefully selects a short sequence from each actress's performance in a popular romantic comedy, a genre reaching the apex of its commercial success in the early 2000s. Each excerpt chosen by Breitz is a moment shot in close-up, placing the Hollywood star's face centre stage. Extracting and isolating each scene from the rest of the film's diegesis, this ‘cut and paste’ of sorts strips the moment of its original narrative sense. In each work, ‘two televisions are set back-to-back inside a wooden structure: the first monitor displays the “original” footage (for example, Julia Roberts excerpted from Pretty Woman), while the second monitor plays back Breitz's re-performance.’

Paying meticulous attention to the micro-movements of facial muscles in these Hollywood scenes, the artist labours to reproduce the same gestural expression as the actress. Taking note from Cameron Diaz in The Sweetest Thing (2002), she purses her lips. Following Jenifer Lopez in Angel Eyes (2001), Breitz squints her eyes, and so on. The film's original soundtrack accompanies Breitz's copy as the voice of each actress comes to ventriloquise the artist's own body, which is screened here in black and white against the lush, vibrant tones of the ‘rom-com’ clips. Played on loop in the white cube, both sets of performances are trapped in a potentially endless recirculation of the affect they stage.