Free and open for all!
Images have never been as freely circulated as they are today. They have also never been so tightly controlled. As with the birth of photography, digital reproduction has created new possibilities for the duplication and consumption of images, offering greater dissemination and access. But this mass-distribution also stirs anxieties concerning authenticity and ownership.
In this talk Erika Balsom questions how historically and now artists are engaging with the moving image amongst these issues of reproducibility. What might the history of the moving image in art look like if retold through the lens of circulation?
This Plattform event is organised for the exhibition ‘I Couldn’t Sleep in My Dream’ by Beatrice Gibson in Bergen Kunsthall (25.1. – 31.3.2019). Erika is contributing to the forthcoming book published for the exhibition, alongside new essays by Mason Leaver-Yap and Irene Revell.
Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London. Her book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, was published by Columbia University Press in 2017. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013), the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (2016), and a frequent contributor to magazines such as Artforum, frieze, and Sight and Sound. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals including Cinema Journal, Screen, and Grey Room, and she has contributed to exhibition catalogues for artists including Sarah Sze, Candice Breitz, and Rachel Rose. In 2017, she was the international curator in residence at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Zealand, resulting in the 2018 screening programme and publication An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. In 2018, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.