To witness, is not one directional

Macdonald, Anna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6068-9688 (2019) To witness, is not one directional. Horsecross Arts Ltd..

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Abstract

Iliyana Nedkova, the curator of the exhibition, invited me to respond to Millar's film here because she felt it poses similar questions, about loss, identity and screendance, to my recent body of work, Acts of Holding. Millar and I are both mature female artists thinking about mortality (I was told once by a curator that he was so tired of women making work about things like death and motherhood – right before I showed him my portfolio….). Witness is part of a longer documentary and so the version I have seen acts both as a trailer for this longer film, and a screendance in its own right. Watching something that you know is an edited version of something longer sets up an interesting tension, particularly, perhaps, when it concerns a state of fragmented presence, of dementia. It also makes me aware of the importance of resisting the urge to speak for a film that is only one film from an entire exhibition, and is itself part of something larger. So these thoughts must be taken as speculations from a restricted view, and it is the act of viewing, or more specifically the different ways Millar and I position the viewer as witness, that interests me here.