This seminar is organized by the European Centre for Documentary Research (eCDR), as a complementary activity to expand the research work developed by its members and to generate links and collaborations with artists, theorists and other researchers.
The present session focuses on contemporary documentary practices in photography and film, through interdisciplinary approaches. Amongst other topics, the speakers will present work that deals with the boundaries of representation and visibility, new technologies and new conceptualizations of visual practice, as well as crossings between different media and collaborations between practitioners and writers.
PROGRAM
10.30 am Opening session
Erika Balsom - “Mere” Recording?: Documentary, Contemporary Art, and the Orthodoxy of Ecstatic Truth.
Film Screening - “El Mar la Mar”, Joshua Bonetta
13.00 pm Lunch Break
02.00 pm Andrea Stultiens - a.k.a. Ebifananyi. Reflections on photographs in Uganda.
Round-Table Alba Giménez, Ana Catarina Pinho, Andrea Stultiens and Erika Balsom
Conversation moderated by Professor Mark Durden
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
ERIKA BALSOM is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College, London. She received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, MA in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London and BA in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. She also held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Univesity of Calfornia, Berkeley (2010-2011).
Her research interests include experimental documentary, the intersections of cinema and art, and histories of technological change in media studies. Her most recent book, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press in 2017) explores how artists and filmmakers have conceived of and confronted the reproducibility of film and video. In 2016 she coedited Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press), an anthology bringing together interventions at the vanguard of the conceptualization of contemporary documentary practices. This collection seeks to provide a capacious and interdisciplinary account of the vital field of practice that is documentary. Her 2013 monograph, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, confronts the changing contours of what we call “cinema” after digitization through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history in art since 1990.
In addition to her academic scholarship, Erika writes criticism on art and film that appears regularly in publications such as Artforum and Sight and Sound. She has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogues, including recent texts on Candice Breitz, Amar Kanwar, Sarah Sze, and the grid in digital art.
ANDREA STULTIENS received a Bfa and Mfa in photography at HKU University of the Arts and AKV St Joost in Breda respectively, and a Ma in photographic studies from Leiden University. She is currently finalising a practice based PhD research at the same university and divides her time between the Netherlands and Uganda.
Stultiens' artistic practice deals with photographs in relation to understandings of the presentations of histories. Since 2007 she mainly works with photograph from the African continent. She thinks of her artistic and research practice as collective making.
Since 2002 Stultiens has been teaching at Minerva Art Academy / Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen (NL). Since 2013 she has been involved in the research department of the university, where she focusses on the use of photographs in artistic practices, with an emphasis on intercultural and interdisciplinary contexts. Stultiens won several awards, among others the Steenbergen Stipendium 1998, Bouw in Beeld Prijs 2009, GiDi Photo Art Award 2012. She exhibits and publishes internationally, with a focus on Uganda and the Netherlands.