Bernadette
Duncan CampbellAt Dar Al Kalima College
November 14, 2018, 12 to 1:30 pm
Film screening in the presence of Dar Jacir's current artist in residence director Duncan Campbell followed by a discussion. This event is held in partnership with Dar al-Kalima University College of Arts and Culture.
Duncan Campbell’s film Bernadette presents an unconventional yet insightful portrait of Irish dissident and political activist Bernadette Devlin. In 1969, at the age of 21, Devlin became the youngest member of the House of Parliament. Devlin’s brilliant oratory, her fierce political independence, and her efforts at promoting class solidarity beyond sectarian divisions made her a leading figure in the Irish Republican movement. Campbell’s film utilizes archival material, found footage, animation, and scripted voice-over to upend the formal conventions of documentary filmmaking. The film serves as an exploration of recent history and subversively critiques and questions the methods by which historical figures are represented by the media.
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 centre 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.
Supported by the A. M. Qattan Foundation through the “Visual Arts: A Flourishing Field” project funded by Sweden.
