2011
An award-winning photographer, videographer and visual artist, Donigan Cumming has internationally exhibited and screened videos that are widely praised (and criticized) for their genre-bending, unsettling iconoclasm. Splitting the Choir – a collection of essays along with a video script, a new interview with the artist and a videography – marks a period of sixteen years since Cumming’s first video, A Prayer for Nettie (1995). The essays in this volume take up a range of topics in relation to Cumming’s videos, from the role of photography and memory in the moving images and temporalities of video to questions of ethics, representation and performance in the documentary. The essays demonstrate that as Cumming continues to chart the underrepresented life-worlds and experiences of the marginal (elderly, ill, damaged, broken) citizens of Montreal, those who would seem to be so radically “other,” he insistently reminds us of the things we share in common.
Contributors: Scott Birdwise, Mireille Bourgeois, Zoë Constantinides, Blake Fitzpatrick, Marcy Goldberg, Mike Hoolboom, Tom McSorley, Solomon Nagler, Craig Rodmore and
Christopher Rohde
Splitting the Choir: The Moving Images of Donigan Cumming
A collection of nine essays, a script (Wrap) and interview by Scott Birdwise. Republished web edition, 2023.
ISBN: 0-919096-45-X
