Under A Malicious Sky...takes its title from a poem by Paul Celan, a Jewish poet whose work and life expressed the agony of the Holocast and its aftermath in memory. Breder's videotape is a personal, autobiographical work, which uses appropriated footage from the movies broadcast on television to explore the first ten years of the artist's life in Germany (1935-1945). Like Celan's words, the images mix fragments of the real and imaginary in a hermetic effort to express Breder's quest for a visual text that is at once personal reflection and cultural criticism.

John Hanhardt, 1989