Duncan Campbell is an Irish video artist based in Glasgow; he was the recipient of the 2014 Turner Prize for his video work It for Others. Campbell’s art draws extensively on archival research, and examines the role that archives play in our knowledge of, and emotional connection to, the past. Through combining found and created material, this is work that questions the borders between personal and historical memory, dream and documentary, word and image.
Past subjects include Northern Irish politician Bernadette Devlin (Bernadette, 2008), the DeLorean car project (Make it New, John, 2009), and Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’ 1953 film Les statues meurent aussi, (It for Others, 2013). Most recently Duncan has worked in the archives of the Irish File Centre to make The Welfare of Tomás Ó Hallissy (2017).
Campbell has a long-standing interest in the work of Samuel Beckett, as is evident from his 2006 film O, Joan, No, based in part on the stage directions for Beckett’s Play.
Over the course of the year-long Fellowship, Duncan will engage with the contents, history and spaces of the world-leading archive relating to Samuel Beckett’s work which is held at the University’s Special Collections. Supported by colleagues at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre, through this engagement with the archives he will produce new creative work, to be premiered at the end of his time with us. Duncan follow our Inaugural Fellow, Eimear McBride, and novelist Robert McCrum and composer Tim Parkinson, in accepting a Creative Fellowship at the Centre. We are very excited about the opportunity to work with Duncan.