Modern Body Festival is proud to present the Dutch Premiere of Erdem Taşdelen’s Wild Child
OCT 26-28 | EXHIBITION | THE GREY SPACE IN THE MIDDLE
Wild Child takes its inspiration from the story of Victor of Aveyron, a feral boy found in France in 1798, and fabricates an analogous version taking place in Canada today. It is imagined that this story will be told in a fictitious documentary, but Wild Child is not this documentary itself. The first of the two videos in Wild Child features twelve actors acting as though they are auditioning to play the three characters in this imagined documentary, and the second shows footage from the woods where the feral boy might have lived, were this story true. These films satirically draw attention to the mechanics at work in the representation of fantasies about human nature, as well as undermining the claim to truth that such documentaries normally make.
Written, directed and edited by: Erdem Taşdelen
Director of photography: Jan Klompje
Sound operator: Pietro Sammarco
Script assistant: Kristina Fiedrich
Production assistant: Robyn Abbott
Casting assistant: Cemrenaz Uyguner
Commissioned by Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2015
Produced with support from British Columbia Arts Council and Cineworks
BIO
Erdem Taşdelen (TR/CA) is a Turkish-Canadian artist based in Toronto. His diverse projects bring self-expression into question within the context of culturally learned behaviours, where he often draws from unique historical narratives to address the complexities of current sociopolitical issues. His work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, and reviewed in publications including Artforum, Flash Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Canadian Art and C Magazine. He was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize in Visual Arts by the Canada Council for the Arts in 2016, and the Charles Pachter Prize for Emerging Artists by the Hnatyshyn Foundation in 2014.
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