About the film 'exergue – on documenta 14'
With Dimitris Athiridis and Adam Szymczyk
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Date
- / Cancelled / Sold out
Location
Studio Centro de Arte Moderna GulbenkianThe talk will be held in English, with simultaneous translation to Portuguese.
Pricing
- Free entry
This engrossing 14 hour film, almost 10 years in the making, intimately follows Adam Szymczyk and his curatorial team as they develop their radical and controversial proposal for the historic 2017 edition of the world’s most prominent art exhibition.
Szymczyk’s ambitious documenta 14 would see the quinquennial exhibition held for the first time in two cities: Kassel, Germany (its historic home, since 1955), and Athens – the centre of Europe’s then financial crisis. In many ways, this film documents the end of a cultural era, the beginning of the next, and the gateway to an uncertain future, through an observational film of remarkable access, acuity and transparency.
This epic documentary presents a reflection on the place, politics and function of contemporary art and its institutions in an inexorably changing global landscape.
Athridis and Szymczyk come together at CAM to discuss both the process of conceiving documenta 14 and of creating the film.
As part of the DocLisboa 24 programme, the film will be screened in three parts on 21, 22 and 23 October at Culturgest.
Speakers
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Adam Szymczyk
Adam Szymczyk (Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, 1970) is a curator, author and editor based in Zurich, Switzerland. He studied art history at the University of Warsaw and was a co-founder of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, where he worked as a curator from 1997 to 2003. He was Director and Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Basel between 2003 and 2014, and served as Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel between 2014 and 2017. Curator-at-Large at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 2020 to 2024, in 2022, he founded the Verein by Association, a non-profit association for contemporary arts and culture in Zurich.
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Dimitris Athiridis
Dimitris Athiridis is a documentary filmmaker and photographer from Thessaloniki, Greece. After his uncompleted studies in engineering, he worked as a photographer and DP in advertising. As a filmmaker he creates profound character studies, approaching them as existential adventures. Past work includes ‘T4 Trouble and the Self Admiration Society’, an exploration into the enigmatic life of rock antihero Terry Papadinas, and ‘One Step Ahead’, which chronicles the journey of Yiannis Boutaris, an iconoclastic winemaker, as he runs for mayor of Thessaloniki, challenging the political establishment.
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Luísa Santos
Luísa Santos (Lisbon, 1980) is a PhD in Culture Studies from the Humboldt & Viadrina School of Governance, Berlin, and MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London. She is an Assistant Professor and Researcher in Artistic Studies at the Faculty of Human Sciences of Universidade Católica Portuguesa. She has been an independent researcher since 2009 and her projects reveal a particular interest in the social role of art and art institutions, as well as the formats and methodologies associated with them.
Programme
19:00 / Introduction
19:05 / Talk
19:50 / Q&A
20:30 / Closing
Credits
Main image
Still from 'exergue - on documenta 14' / Courtesy of Kino Rebelde
Partnership
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