“Performative Documents” is a curatorial and theoretical research project that aims to explore how visual documents and practices not only capture but also produce the realities they visualize, and thus could be understood as ‘performative documents’.
Anneke de Boer: 'Running and Falling: Actress and Stuntwoman' 2004
My research should result in a programme of screenings, combined with lectures and discussions; in addition, it will contribute to the realisation of an exhibition provisionally entitled “Performing Evidence”, and establish the ground for a concluding thematic publication.
The notion of ‘the performative documentary’ is a productive critical tool, but so far it has been used in a limited sense to refer to documentaries in which performative strategies are used deliberately as an alienating, distancing device, emphasizing a self-conscious reflection on behalf of the filmmaker, and sometimes on behalf of the subjects filmed, on what it means to produce a document.
I would like to expand the understanding of the ‘performative document’, to explore how different kinds of filmic and photographic documents – also those which do not contain such self-conscious reflexivity – do more than merely document realities, and in important ways produce the realities they represent.
In this research project I will focus specifically on documents evolving around people’s behaviour and identity. Involving people ‘performing themselves’, they will allow me to shift emphasis from a more common questioning of how documents implicitly or explicitly create a position and point of view for the viewer, to a questioning of how the making of a document influences the people who are part of this process, shaping their behaviour and their understanding of themselves.
This research project aims to contribute to current discussions about the document and about the relation between representation and reality – with a specific focus on the structuring role of visual practices for people’s behaviour, identity and sense of self. The project positions itself deliberately on the intersection between art, visual culture, and the history of the social sciences.
The context and motivation for this research project lie in current discussions and are triggered by a sense of urgency in the face of the growing disbelief in the truth claims of visual documents. But in order to gain a new perspective on this subject, I have deliberately chosen to look not only at contemporary art works, but to also look back at a historical documents and practices that can help us see how an intricate relationship between what images claim to show and how they make us feel and act has been a property of visual culture from the very start.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the then new media of photography and film played a crucial role in the developing sciences of medicine, psychology and ethnography, and their understanding, as well as shaping, of people’s behaviour and identity. I would like to revisit and investigate some of these early documents, while simultaneously looking at contemporary artists working with related subjects. Relevant contemporary artists are, for example, Zoe Beloff, Anneke de Boer, Rod Dickinson, Douglas Gordon, Harun Farocki, Renzo Martens, Melvin Moti, Hito Steyerl, Fiona Tan, Kerry Tribe, and Artur Zmijewksi.
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