Thought and Image: Processes of Reciprocity – Duncan Campbell

Join us for the final Artist Master Class with end of term reception in extraordinary Waterlow Park.

Duncan Campbell is an Irish video artist based in Glasgow. His works include Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2004), Bernadette (2008), Make it New John (2009), Arbeit (2011), and It for Others (2013), originally made for the Scotland pavilion of the Venice Biennial for which he won the Turner Prize in 2014. His works reconstruct politically charged and contested historical figures, places and events, presenting intricate mosaics composed of juxtaposed fragments of archival material (TV news footage, photographs, advertisements, memoirs and letters) brought together with overtly fictionalised, dramatised or poetically imagined elements. Duncan Campbell’s multi-layered works challenge the self-evidently authoritative claims of both the archival document and documentary. They constitute a series of rigorously researched, formal experiments, open-ended historical inquiries, which reflect on the mediation of the past congealed in stories and images.
Duncan Campbell will be speaking about his current project in which he revisits his early film, Falls Burns Malone Fiddles. That film drew on two community photographic archives in Belfast to intervene in clichéd representations of the conflict filled years of the 1970s and 80s.  Instead these images inhabit the everyday experience of those years; the hairstyles, fashions and hopes of the young during that period.  We will hear about his thoughts on that and its relationship to his current work.
There will be ample time for formal and informal discussion, with a reception to follow.