Conversation
January 21, 2015, 7pm
Accompanying the exhibition of Laura Poitras’s 9/11 Trilogy at Artists Space, the filmmaker will be in conversation with writer and editor Bettina Funcke. Their discussion will center on the making of the 9/11 Trilogy, the themes raised within the films, and how Poitras situates her work in relation to modes of filmmaking, journalism and critical art production.
Laura Poitras’s Academy Award-nominated CITIZENFOUR (2014), currently screening in theatres, and her two previous films on view at Artists Space, My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010), form a trilogy that serves as a primary document of the post-9/11 security state. Poitras’s practice of placing herself within situations as they unfold and in proximity to those directly affected, suggests a visual form of gathering, processing and disseminating information, articulated through the lived experience of individuals. Along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, Poitras founded The Intercept in 2013, an online news outlet dedicated to supporting independent investigative journalism.
Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and artist currently living in Berlin. Her film CITIZENFOUR is nominated for awards including the 2015 Academy Award for best documentary feature and the 2015 BAFTA award for best documentary, and has won numerous awards including the 2014 New York Film Critics Circle for best non-fiction film. The associated reporting around Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. My Country, My Country was nominated for an Academy Award in 2007, and The Oath was nominated for two Emmy awards. Her work was exhibited in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and she will have a solo exhibition at the Whitney in Spring 2016. In 2012 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and has taught filmmaking at Duke and Yale Universities.
Bettina Funcke is a writer and editor based in New York City, where she teaches in the Masters Program in Critical Theory & the Arts at the School of Visual Arts. From 2009 to 2012, Funcke was Head of Publications for dOCUMENTA (13) where she edited the exhibition catalogs and the publication series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. From 2006 to 2010 she was the US editor of Parkett magazine, and from 1999 to 2005 a book editor at the Dia Art Foundation. She is the author of the book Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low (Sternberg Press, 2009) and her writings on contemporary art have been widely published, in magazines including Afterall, Artforum, Parkett and Texte zur Kunst, and in monographic artist books. She is a co-founder of The Leopard Press and the Continuous Project group.
