Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London. Her next book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, is forthcoming this spring from Columbia University Press. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and a frequent contributor to Artforum and Sight and Sound.
Rehabilitating Observation: Lens-Based Capture and the ‘Collapse’ of Reality (lecture)
Today, much popular cinema has moved away from the primacy of lens-based capture, foregoing the documentary registration of real bodies in real spaces, while fake news proliferates and the US president deems real news fake. How are critical documentary practices best poised to respond to this state of affairs? What does the kind of access to the world afforded by documentary look like and mean in our contemporary moment — a moment marked at once by ubiquitous computing, widespread political, humanitarian, and ecological crisis, and what some have deemed a ‘collapse’ of reality? Erika Balsom offers a polemic, proposing that practices privileging lens-based capture — in particular, the long-beleaguered observational mode of documentary — are today endowed with a new urgency and radicality.
Arguing that it is necessary to conceive of the world in radically different ways, to decolonise the modern worldview, and to escape from the bubble of a mediatised post-truth society, the panel Sensible Imagination presents alternative ways of navigating the world, documenting reality, and negotiating the entanglements between humans and nonhumans, words and things. The arts of storytelling and knowledge from non-Western and indigenous cultures offer crucial cues for a different conception of our humanity.
SIMILAR ARTISTS
Sat 25 Feb
De Brakke Grond
Ben Russell is an artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the documentary image.
Ben Russell
Sat 25 Feb
De Brakke Grond
Helen Verran is an Australian historian and philosopher of science. She has spent nearly thirty years working with Aboriginal Australians in northeast Arnhem Land.