Commensal: The politics of engagement and spectatorship of the installation space in Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing- Taylor’s portrait of a cannibal.

Commensal by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor was installed in a former bean-curd processing plant in Kassel, Germany, for documenta 14 in 2017. There, a video installation depicted ethnographic encounters with an ailing man- Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalised a woman in Paris in 1981, while in an adjoining room a 16mm projector showed home footage of the man and his brother as children. This work, which consisted of archival footage and factual subject matter, may be read as non-fiction or documentary, but its presentation in the context of a large-scale exhibition of contemporary art may suggest that, as a work of art, its form is fluid and subjective. Using Commensal as a central case study, this conference presentation seeks to examine the politics of engagement and spectatorship of documentary film as a contemporary art installation. It will ask how the differing social contract within the site-specific installation space, as opposed to the black box of the cinema space, alters audience expectations and embodied experiences of non-fiction film. How does the physical and sensorial experience of the art-space contribute to the contamination of boundaries between fictional storytelling and documentary testimony? Finally, if the art installation contributes to a subjective reading of non-fiction film, this paper will consider the ethical questions raised by the presentation of a film work such as Commensal within the context of a site-specific contemporary art installation.