Arbeit
Duncan CampbellAt Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center
November 11, 2018, 8 pm
Film screening followed by a discussion with the artist. The film screening is held in relation to the exhibition at KSCC "Debt".
In the film Arbeit, Duncan Campbell scrutinizes the views of German economist Hans Tietmeyer, a financial expert and politician who greatly influenced the introduction of a common European currency. Using old newsreel footage, archive photographs, adverts, and the narrator´s voice, the artist builds up a story which reveals unexpected links between people, theories and anecdotes, while attempting get to the source of the current economic crisis. Even though Tietmeyer has constantly been a member of powerful international bodies over the last twenty years, Campbell deliberately makes no direct present-day references, as if Tietmeyer were a figure from the distant past. The work also reflects on how it is impossible to portray the past and historical narrative objectively, a typical feature in Campbell’s art.
Duncan Campbell (b.1972 in Dublin, Ireland) lives and works in Glasgow. He is best known for his films which focus on particular moments in history, and the people and objects at the center of those histories. He uses archive material as a route to research subjects and histories that he feels are important. The process of making the films becomes a means to further understand his subjects and reveal the complexity of how they have been previously represented. Although these histories are located in specific times and geographies they resonate with and inform our present. Extensive research into the subjects through archival material underpins all of the films and the histories Campbell chooses to focus on reflect his interest. Using both archival and filmed material, his films question our reading of the documentary form as a fixed representation of reality, opening up boundaries between the actual and the imagined, record and interpretation.
He completed the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1998 and a BA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in 1996. Campbell was the winner of the 2014 Turner Prize (Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards, Tris Vonna-Michell) and was one of three artists representing Scotland at the Venice Biennale as part of Scotland + Venice 2013 (Corin Sworn, Campbell, Hayley Tompkins). In 2012 Campbell took part in Manifesta 9 curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, Belgium and in 2010 he took part in Tracing the Invisible, Gwangju Biennale. In 2017, Wiels, Brussels will host a solo exhibition on Duncan Campbell.
This event is the first partnership between Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research and Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center and is supported by the A. M. Qattan Foundation through the “Visual Arts: A Flourishing Field” project funded by Sweden.
