Time: April 11, 18.00hr / 6pm
Location: Piet Zwart Institute Master Fine Art, Karel Doormanhof 45, Rotterdam
Language: English 

Reenactment and the lost object: documentary, art and restaging reality

This lecture will be prefaced by a brief introduction to British artist John Keane’s elliptical portraits of real subjects (politicians, public figures). Keane’s subjects, pixelated, blurred and buried under layers of paint, are more or (frequently) less recognisable. Do they offer metaphors for our frustrating search for reality in the documentary image? Taking a range of different examples (Bruce Conner’s Report, Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame, Peter Greenaway’s Act of God, Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave, Milo Rau’s The Last Days of the Ceaucesus) this lecture will engage with some of the ways in which artists working in documentary film have used repetition and reenactment to frame and try to reach an understanding of the truth. 

Stella Bruzzi FBA has been Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Film at University College London (UCL) since 2017 where she is also Professor of Film. Her first academic post was at the University of Manchester, followed by periods at Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Warwick, where she also served Chair of the Faculty of Arts from 2008 to 2011. She has published widely in the areas of costume and cinema, documentary (including the influential New Documentary in 2006), gender and masculinity in Hollywood and representations of history, and has, to date, published eight monographs, the last of which was Approximation: Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality (Routledge, 2020). In 2013 she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Entrance is free and open to all, no reservations necessary.  Accessibility:
The ground floor of the MFA building at Kareldoormanhoff 45  has step free access up a short ramp via the garden courtyard entrance. Gender neutral toilets are available but there are no wheelchair accessible toilets. Please get in touch if you have any questions about access.