OBJECT ! ON THE DOCUMENTARY AS ART Saturday 4th February 11.30 – 17:30 WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON This one-day symposium brings together filmmakers, artists and scholars to explore the aesthetic potential, political stakes and ethical challenges that arise from regarding documentary film as an art object. We will consider documentary as a commodity in circulation, a resource in artistic production, a material trace, a document, or simply as “a thing like you and me” (Hito Steyerl). Object! On the Documentary as Art aims to reframe the meeting point of films, makers and audiences in ethical terms. In light of the ongoing proliferation of documentary material in artistic production – the so- called ‘documentary turn’– and the exchange of these works in the marketplace as art objects, what are the ethical and political implications of this ‘object turn’ in documentary film? What novel avenues does it open up for critical practice? The day of presentations includes screenings of artists’ films and documentaries, and is complemented by a series of evening programmes at Close-Up Film Centre from February 7th, 2017. Produced in collaboration with Sheffield Fringe, the event is organised by Minou Norouzi, Mihaela Brebenel and Nikolaus Perneczky, with support from Openvizor, the Arts Council England and the Austrian Cultural Forum. PROGRAMME 11:00 – 11.:30 Registration 11.30 – 13:00 SESSION 1 Keynote by Erika Balsom (King’s College London) on documentary as a critical method and its predominance in contemporary art. The keynote is followed by a panel presentation and discussion with Rosalind Nashashibi and Mairéad McClean on the aesthetic potential and ethical challenges of approaching documentary as a material object. ERIKA BALSOM: Beyond Simulation: The Documentary Attitude in Contemporary Art A dominant line of thinking from the 1990s onward sees observational documentary swiftly deemed naive and spectators incessantly warned not to believe in the reality of the image. For some, the acknowledgement that all images partake of construction and convention liquidates the difference between fiction and documentary entirely. Did this postmodern critique of immediacy and objectivity do its job too well? Now a different “post-” has become a buzzword: the age of “post-truth politics” has apparently arrived. Meanwhile, lens-based capture is increasingly being displaced by computer-generated images. How can experimental documentary practices respond to this state of affairs? What are the critical imperatives today, and how have they changed since the 1990s? Through an examination of the work of selected contemporary artists, this talk will argue that reflexive documentary practices must reject the cynical proposal that reality has faded into mere simulation and instead insist on an ethics of attunement as the starting point of a production of truth. – EB ROSALIND NASHASHIBI: tba