Peter Freund (USA)
is a media artist, curator, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. As an artist, Freund works principally with film and video in single-channel and installation formats and has exhibited in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and the Middle East. His work advances a poetics of political otherness while examining the fantasmatic aspect of historical memory.
Freund is Associate Professor of Art Practice at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he teaches experimental media art production and critical theory. He is returning from a five-month sabbatical stay in Hong Kong, where he was Visiting Artist with the Hong Kong Society of Psychoanalysis. His current curatorial project, Surplus/Lack, an international experimental film/video exhibit, will premiere in 2013.
Title: CAMP, 2010/11, 07:15
Peter Freund’s Camp superimposes the political and theatrical senses of the word “camp,” pointing to unexpected convergences between the figure of the concentration camp and camp aesthetics. Without diminishing the horror of the Holocaust, the film suggests the essential role of fantasy in traumatic historical memory and the ethical grounding of campy enjoyment. Two narrators, one speaking Mandarin and the other Arabic, mix statements by Giorgio Agamben, Susan Sontag, and other writers with original commentary.