Experiments in Facts and Fiction: The Work of Sharon Lockhart
Experiments in Facts and Fiction: The Work of Sharon Lockhart
- Date
- Feb 12th 2009
- With
- Anselm Franke, Sharon Lockhart, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
In cooperation with Berlinale Forum expanded.
Over the last 15 years Sharon Lockhart has made films and photographs that frame the quiet moments of everyday life while exploring the subtle relationship between the two mediums. Much of her photographic work has involved staging scenes in a method reminiscent of filmmaking, while her films emphasise the photographic qualities of the moving image. While she sees herself as strongly influenced by the structuralist film tradition, her work blends rigorous aesthetic concerns with anthropological explorations.
She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. Moving with ease between the worlds of art and film, Sharon Lockhart is at the same time very aware of the differences between the cinema and the gallery, and will elaborate on how she chooses and knows exactly what to shows in which context. She discusses with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus her experiments with reality and fiction and how her work manages to offer us a way to look at the everyday, taking what we feel to be certainty and what we sense in our minds to be evermore inexplicable.
Over the last 15 years Sharon Lockhart has made films and photographs that frame the quiet moments of everyday life while exploring the subtle relationship between the two mediums. Much of her photographic work has involved staging scenes in a method reminiscent of filmmaking, while her films emphasise the photographic qualities of the moving image. While she sees herself as strongly influenced by the structuralist film tradition, her work blends rigorous aesthetic concerns with anthropological explorations.
She carefully manipulates formal elements as she explores certain concepts with regularity: portraiture, the relationship between photography and film, and the combination of fictive or choreographed performances with unscripted, intimate moments. Moving with ease between the worlds of art and film, Sharon Lockhart is at the same time very aware of the differences between the cinema and the gallery, and will elaborate on how she chooses and knows exactly what to shows in which context. She discusses with Stefanie Schulte Strathaus her experiments with reality and fiction and how her work manages to offer us a way to look at the everyday, taking what we feel to be certainty and what we sense in our minds to be evermore inexplicable.
Anselm Franke
Curator and writer, he is currently the Artistic Director of Extra City Centre for Contemporary Art in Antwerp. He has edited and published with different publishing houses and is on the advisory board of the Berlinale Forum Expanded.
Sharon Lockhart
American artist and filmmaker, her work won many awards. Recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Asian Cultural Council, her films NO and TEATRO AMAZONAS screened at the Berlinale Forum in 2000. The Berlinale Forum expanded showed her film PINE FLAT in 2006 and LUNCH BREAK in 2009.
Stefanie Schulte Strathaus
A curator at the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin and the head of the Berlinale Forum Expanded section, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is also the co-founder and a board member of the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt/Main.
© Karine Azoubib