Kerry Tribe’s work in a variety of media explores relationships between subjectivity and representation, often by investigating the grey areas between the authentic and the scripted, or the collective and the idiosyncratic. She regularly invites the unpredictability of collaboration to produce ludic philosophical inquiries through structurally rigorous forms. Tribe approaches her work from a background in the histories of experimental documentary filmmaking. Many of her long-term projects begin with a strong investment in the possibilities, problematics and poetics of the social document. Her work often suggests implicitly political concerns insofar as it explores and exposes the power dynamics of representation and calls into question standard notions of what constitutes ‘the public’.

Tribe’s two-channel video installation ‘Here & Elsewhere’ (2002) touches on themes of history (in particular the history of the 1970s), memory and epistemology through an unusually philosophical interview between British film theorist Peter Wollen and his exceptionally thoughtful ten-year-old daughter. Her ‘Florida’ (2003) pairs meandering long takes of the lush savannas and steamy swamps of rural Florida with the voices of elderly nursing home residents in an extended meditation on aging, longing and death. In ‘North is West/South is East’ (2002), Tribe offers a series of unofficial maps of Los Angeles drawn by strangers that she approached at Los Angeles International Airport. Her most recent film, ‘Northern Lights’ (2005), employs low-tech optical effects and an obsolete musical instrument in an abstracted investigation of the phenomenology of memory.

(Althea Thauberger)