Art of the Real Spotlights: / Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”

Art of the Real Spotlights:
Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”

Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki, El Mar La Mar (still), 2017. Courtesy of The Cinema Guild.

Bar Laika presents
Art of the Real Spotlights:
Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or Describe? Experimental Documentary Beyond Docufiction”
Date
April 28, 2019, 9pm
Bar Laika by e-flux
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.

Category
Film

Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021, shortlisted for the Kraszna Krausz prize). Her criticism appears regularly in venues such as Artforum, Cinema Scope, and 4Columns. With Hila Peleg, she is the co-curator of the exhibition No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (HKW Berlin, 2022) and co-editor of the books Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (2022) and Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), both published by MIT Press. In 2018, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Map
RSVP
RSVP for Art of the Real Spotlights: Erika Balsom, “To Narrate or…

Thank you for your RSVP.

will be in touch.

Subscribe

e-flux announcements are emailed press releases for art exhibitions from all over the world.

Agenda delivers news from galleries, art spaces, and publications, while Criticism publishes reviews of exhibitions and books.

Architecture announcements cover current architecture and design projects, symposia, exhibitions, and publications from all over the world.

Film announcements are newsletters about screenings, film festivals, and exhibitions of moving image.

Education announces academic employment opportunities, calls for applications, symposia, publications, exhibitions, and educational programs.

Sign up to receive information about events organized by e-flux at e-flux Screening Room, Bar Laika, or elsewhere.

I have read e-flux’s privacy policy and agree that e-flux may send me announcements to the email address entered above and that my data will be processed for this purpose in accordance with e-flux’s privacy policy*

Thank you for your interest in e-flux. Check your inbox to confirm your subscription.