Candice Breitz

Cleft-lipped, navel-less miniature mutants—dressed inexplicably in Devo-esque jumpsuits—are the chilling bogeymen in David Cronenberg’s 1979 horror film, The Brood. Scarier, though, is what unleashes them: the unorthodox therapeutic practice of Dr. Raglan, who seeks to treat the antiheroine Nola Carveth by excavating her repressed rage through spirited role play. As a result of Raglan’s questionable methods, his patients’ emotions become somatized symptoms: whether welts, glistening pustules, or, in Nola’s case, the titular squad of undersize assassins, who bud parthenogenetically from her abdomen and later try to bump off her daughter.

The Brood’s therapy scenes, isolated from the rest of the film, make up one of the two channels in artist Candice Breitz’s 2013 video work, Treatment. (The show was presented by Kaufmann Repetto in Milan at the Andrew Kreps Gallery space.)

— Dawn Chan