Commentary

“There's something inevitably fascistic about a perfect world” - Stella Brennan.

UK academic Sean Cubitt joins Stella Brennan and host Mark Amery to discuss Stella's recent show at Trish Clark gallery Object Permanence, technological utopias and "responding to the ancestors that we’ve locked up."

What strategies do contemporary artists employ to test media representation of reality and the means through which we channel and consume it? How do artists expand the documentary form through various material processes and formal strategies? How do artists deconstruct the surfeit of images we already have and the means by which we receive them? Can 'truth' and fiction exist in the same space? What historical artworks could be part of a revised genealogy of current documentary practices in Aotearoa New Zealand? How could an ethic of care, as understood through sustained relationships with Indigenous and diverse communities be played out through documentary practices?

A warning, perhaps, for reviewers. On the second floor of the Govett Brewster large sheets of paper are lit by vivid red lights. In the gloom, we can make out semi-deconstructed poems and brief statements: coherent, unclear, clear – she / shallowness-depth-she / Less-less-than lack-she.

"I expected beautiful landscapes…but the films are so claustrophobic". A round up of recent CIRCUIT screenings in Europe, audience response, and reflection on different models for exchange.