Art of the Real Spotlights:
Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”
April 28, 2019, 9pm
224 Greene Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
USA
A co-presentation of Art of the Real and e-flux Bar Laika.
Now celebrating its sixth year, Art of the Real is the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual survey of the most vital and innovative voices in nonfiction moving-image cinema and art. Organized by Dennis Lim and Rachael Rakes, each edition features a selection of Spotlights that take a closer look at a range of practices in experimental documentary. This year, AOTR will collaborate with e-flux Bar Laika to present two spotlight events at Bar Laika with the artist and filmmaker Eric Baudelaire (on April 21, 9pm; see information about the event here), and the scholar and critic Erika Balsom (on April 28, 9pm).
Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”
This talk will consider how and why hybridity, fiction, and “blurring boundaries” have figured as recurring preoccupations in critical and curatorial efforts to conceptualize the vitality of experimental documentary practices. Looking to the limits of this discourse, it will explore how some artists and filmmakers have turned to the very different strategies of description and observation, finding in them the possibility of asserting belief in reality at a time of its supposed collapse.
Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London and the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017) and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013); the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016); and a frequent contributor to magazines such as Artforum, frieze, and Sight & Sound.
For more information, contact laika@e-flux.com.