Adam Chodzko

Video art and film  between documentary and fiction
Wednesday 9 June 2010 10.30-6pm

One-day Symposium Wednesday 9 June 2010 10.30-6pm
Grimond Lecture Theatre 3 & Aphra Theatre, Grimond Building, Canterbury Campus.*
Speakers: Irit Rogoff (Goldsmith’s) and Jon Dovey (Un. of West of England)
Panels with artists and academics:  Adam Chodzko, Brian Dillon, Jeremy Millar, Lauren Wright, Sarah Turner, Elizabeth Cowie and Michael Newall.

The symposium addresses video and installation art that engages the social through combining techniques of documentary and fiction.  In this context it also examines participation and reflexivity – approaches that are often important to such art.  The distinction between fiction and non-fiction is one which emerged primarily in relation to literature and to journalism, but it was with the development of photography and later cinema that a specifically documentary project emerged, and which developed as a film-making practice in the 1920s and 1930s not only of social scientists, such as John Grierson, but also of artist film-makers, Hans Richter, Germaine Dulac, Joris Ivens, Humphrey Jennings, Luis Buñuel, engaging both abstract art and surrealism.

It is a concern that was continued within conceptual art.  But while many contemporary artists have a moving image practice where works ‘move between reality and fiction’ – indeed it is an oscillation that is now something of a cliché, which we as viewers can easily decode – this symposium addresses the question of why in an art work these transitions occur at a particular point in its temporal organisation.  It asks: why, at particular moments in a work, does a document of the real become excessive such that it seeks a correcting truth of fiction as a ‘surreality’, or alternatively, a fictional work deploys the truth of documentary?  As part of the symposium works by the participants and by others will be screened.

For further information, see our website http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/

Free. All are welcome. If you wish to attend, please let us know:  Angela Whiffen or Jan Langbein on 01227 827567/823177 or e.j.cowie@kent.ac.uk or adam.chodzko@virgin.net or M.B.Newall@kent.ac.uk
*J6 on campus map – http://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/find-campus.html?tab=campus-map

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