Observational film: Administration of social reality

This article identifies a mode of observational film-making among female artists such as Megan Fraser, Beatrice Gibson, Anna Lucas, Rosalind Nashashibi, Elizabeth Price and Emily Wardill, and situates it both formally and historically, in relation to its mode of montaged construction and its relative downplaying of the importance of medium and installation. It argues that through this approach to the moving image, these artists are attempting to understand filming as an act within a social field, for which the act of filming is more important than the act of display. Secondly, it seeks to show that their work bears a consistent fascination with systems and with the materialization of administration, mirroring their understanding of identity and gender as relational rather than static constructs.

Melissa Gronlund is an editor of Afterall and a writer based in London. Focusing on artists' film and specifically on female filmmaking of the past 15 years, she teaches on the MRes: Moving Image course at Central Saint Martins and on artists' film at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, where she is a visiting lecturer. She is also interested in the overlap between text and image in contemporary art.