"CURATING THE DOCUMENTARY", March 7, 2009
"CURATING THE DOCUMENTARY"
A panel discussion at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
When: Saturday, March 7, 2009, 1-4 p.m.
Where: Hessel Museum of Art
Participants:
Anne Ellegood
Okwui Enwezor
Eduardo Thomas
Moderator: Maria Lind
What are the challenges and potentialities of presenting documentary practices in the format of an exhibition? How do these materials, films, videos, installations, and objects engage their audience and what power do they have to alter both the field of art and the public sphere? The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College presents "Curating the Documentary", a panel discussion extending from the three-year research project, The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art. "Curating the Documentary" explores the possibilities and problematics of curating documentary practices in spatial exhibitions. Such exhibitions have the capacity to actively involve the public and reconstitute the relationship of art and exhibition-making to the public sphere. Black box exhibitions that construct cinematic viewing spaces present one model and the conception of an exhibition as an archive presents another. How might post-media documentary practices, which often seek to intervene into reality rather than to solely represent it, catalyze audience participation? How do spatial exhibitions facilitate new approaches to and articulations of documentary materials?
Anne Ellegood is Curator at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washinton, D.C where she organized The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image (2008).
Okwui Enwezor is Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute. He was Artistic Director of Documenta 11 (2002) and of the recent exhibition Archive Fever (2008) at the International Center of Photography, New York.
Eduardo Thomas is an artist whose work incorporates found footage, archival materials, and re-editing techniques.
Moderator Maria Lind is the director of the graduate program at CCS Bard and curator of The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (September 27, 2008-February 1, 2009), the inaugural exhibition of a long-term research project investigating the heritage of documentary practices in contemporary art. The research project, a collaboration between CCS Bard and the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl, will run for approximately three years, having started in March 2008.
For more information please call CCS Bard at 845.758.7598, write ccs@bard.edu or visit www.bard.edu/ccs.
