SALEM, MASS.- The Peabody Essex Museum presents its most ambitious contemporary art commission to date: Candice Breitz’s The Woods. The exhibition follows the journeys of child actors through the world’s three largest mainstream film industries: Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood. Each produces hundreds of films annually that attempt to express the dreams and desires of their audiences. The impact of such aspirational narratives and the idea of stardom has been the subject of many of Breitz’s works over the last 15 years.

“When Candice first told me she wanted to produce a work that put stardom into a global context, I immediately saw how PEM’s cultural DNA could be remixed in a very contemporary way,” says Trevor Smith, PEM’s Curator of the Present Tense.

Breitz traveled to Los Angeles, Mumbai and Lagos over a two-year period to produce The Woods. She edited the footage back at her home base in Berlin into three immersive video installations. They explore the impact of fame on how we create, define and perform identities in a media-saturated society.

Few children who dream of an acting career achieve it, let alone negotiate a successful transition from child actor to adult star. These installations, The Audition, The Rehearsal and The Interview, take us through rituals that actors must pass in their quest for stardom. They each run in a continuous loop, inviting you to enter at any time and to stay as long as you wish.

The Audition

Breitz invited 25 young Hollywood hopefuls to perform the rituals associated with a Hollywood audition. She worked with each actor for about 90 minutes, beginning with their “slate” — the actors’ introduction and description of their special attributes, as well as front-facing and profile poses for the camera. The children then performed a song of their choice (some wrote their own songs). Following Hollywood protocol, the young actors came with prepared monologues. Less routine was the content of the script they had been asked to learn — direct quotations from online advice offered by industry professionals to child actors and their parents. Of the three national film industries featured in The Woods, Hollywood dedicates by far the most resources to training and encouraging child actors.

The Rehearsal

India produces more feature films than any other country in the world. The six young actors featured in The Rehearsal have already experienced some degree of commercial success. The script they perform here — reflections on their lives in show business — is actually a compendium of quotes gathered from interviews with Bollywood’s most visible star, Shah Rukh Khan. In Breitz’s film, Khan figures less as a specific person than as the embodiment of Bollywood stardom, and hence the object of the children’s aspirations. Replicating the typical setting for Bollywood press interviews, Breitz worked with each child for a full day in a five-star hotel room in Mumbai.

The Interview

The two stars of The Interview are Chinedu Ikedieze and Osita Iheme, popularly known as Aki and Pawpaw. These small-statured actors, now in their 30s, gained celebrity as adult actors playing child roles in dozens of Nollywood hits. Nollywood movies are distributed primarily in public markets. These movies represent popular entertainment produced by Africans for an African market and for the African diaspora. Nollywood produces almost twice as many movies as Hollywood each year.