Dr. Mercedes Vicente is an independent curator and writer and has recently completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the Royal College of Art, London, on the work of New Zealand pioneer video artist Darcy Lange.
Symposium and Artist Cinema Commissions
On Friday 25 August at Christchurch Art Gallery CIRCUIT will premiere Thick Cinema, a selection of new artist cinema commissions curated by Mercedes, and featuring work by Fiona Amundsen, John Di Stefano, Sam Hamilton, Kim Pieters, and Joyce Campbell. On 26 August, Mercedes will lead the the symposium The Thickness of Cinema, at the same venue.
Both projects seek to answer the following provocations:
What might be the role of the body and the sensorial experience in the emergence of cinematic intelligibility and meaning? How does film’s affective experience contribute to our knowledge of the world? In what ways might we be able to analyse and get beyond sensation and emotion to explore culture, gender or ideology? How have cinema, and phenomenological approaches to film, been influenced by and responded to recent technological developments in our digital age that offer new and expanded sensory and experiential dimensions? What might the cinematic experience offer in lieu of the new sensorial experiences brought by these technological advances?