Film Archive Presents Talk By Bruce Barber

Film Archive Presents Talk By Bruce Barber

The Adam Art Gallery in association with The New Zealand Film Archive is proud to present a talk by conceptual artist, writer and curator Bruce Barber. 

Barber advocates for the artist to be a critical agent in social life. His practice is based on exchange and the act of giving, and privileges the agency of these gestures as alternative means for societal integration rather than transactions based on money and power. He describes his work as ‘communicative actions’. These are direct actions or interventions that test the idea of art as an act of communication and explore the capacity of speech to be a performance that, rather than offering an explanation or interpretation, leads to another order of understanding that more directly engages with the issue at hand, whether this be a concern with the environment, a particular political situation, or the use of language itself. 

His talk at the New Zealand Film Archive will focus on his practice of ‘communicative action’, contextualised by a screening of video documentation of his performance works.
Bruce Barber is an internationally known artist, writer and curator and is Professor of Media Art, Historical and Critical Studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His interdisciplinary studio work has been included in the Paris Biennale (1977), the Sydney Biennale (1979) and such exhibitions as The Art of Memory: The Loss of History (New Museum, New York, 1985) and A Different War: Vietnam in Art (1989-92), Memory Works (London Regional Gallery 1990-2); Action Replay Artspace, Auckland (1998). Barber is the author of Popular Modernisms: Art, Cartoons, Comics and Cultural In/Subordination (forthcoming), editor of Essays on [Performance] and Cultural Politicisation (1983) and co-editor with Serge Guilbaut and John O'Brian of Voices of Fire: Art Rage, Power, and the State (Toronto, 1996). His critical essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and magazines. 
  

Artist as critical agent: A talk by Bruce Barber
Thursday 11 September, 7pm, KOHA
New Zealand Film Archive mediatheatre
84 Taranaki Street
Wellington

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