Vidéographe is pleased to present Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming, the first in a new series of digital publications edited by Vidéographe. Compiling the 26 videos that Donigan Cumming has produced to date, as well as images of his installations, photographs, drawings and collages, this publication updates and completes the 2005 DVD boxset Controlled Disturbance.

We wanted to present the different facets of Cumming’s practice in order to highlight the common threads that unite his various bodies of work. Privileging an interdisciplinary approach, we have invited authors Zoë Tousignant and Fabrice Montal, a curator and programmer respectively, to examine his work from the perspective of art and film history. We decided to use this web-based format because it allowed us to showcase a wide range of different type of documents, including texts, videos and images, sound works, scripts and an audio interview with Cumming by Jean Perret, a cinéma du reel theorist.

The texts and material selected evidence Cumming’s creative fervour and his constant desire to destabilize and to relentlessly draw on the margins of society and of what is watchable, as well as on his own works.

The production of Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming was made possible thanks to the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

► Link to Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming

All text, sound and image can be accessed free of charge.
Price of virtual boxset: $65

All texts are available in English and French.
Videos are in English and available with French subtitles.

The videos are accessible via institutional and individual subscriptions or via our video-on-demand service.

BIOGRAPHY
Donigan Cumming is a Montréal-based artist whose multimedia practice includes photography, sound, video, drawing, text and collage, among other mediums. His works address themes such as the body, the boundaries between truth and fiction, taboos of representation, and social engagement.

Cumming began his career making sound installations and photographs in the 1980s. Early solo exhibitions included Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography (1986) and Moving Still (1999). In 1995, he began to work with video and in 1996 he was awarded the Telefilm Canada Award for Best Canadian Discovery (Festival du nouveau Cinéma, Montréal, 1996). His work has been shown in Canada and abroad, including at the New York Video Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has had numerous monograph exhibitions and retrospectives. His work has been the subject of much critical analysis and has been referred to in numerous theoretical works and reference books. His photographic and video work has been acquired for the permanent collections of museums and institutions in Quebec, Canada, and around the world. donigancumming.com