The Task
2017 | 118 minutes | 118 minutes | English | The United States of America
What happens when 28 strangers, 10 psychoanalysts, a handful of silent observers, and a film crew come together to discuss their anxieties, hopes and fears? Leigh Ledare’s The Task is a fascinating examination of group dynamics and patterns of stereotyping. Ledare staged a three-day Group Relations conference to create interventions on The Tavistock method—a psychotherapeutic process of studying group dynamics. The participants of the conference belong to different racial, sexual, economic and professional backgrounds, and have to collectively enact a temporary institution whose purpose is to study itself. Undertaking an abstract task allows participants to examine the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics.
The screening of this film was followed by a discussion between the filmmaker Leigh Ledare and social psychologist Yashpal Jogdand.
About the Filmmaker
Leigh Ledare creates work that raises questions of agency, intimacy and consent, transforming the observer into the voyeur of private scenes or situations dealing with social taboos. Using photography, the archive, language, and film, he explores notions of subjectivity in a performative dimension, his interventions putting in tension the realities of social constructions and the projective assumptions that surround them.
Ledare’s projects have been exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Recent exhibitions include: The Plot, The Art Institute of Chicago (2017); Vokzal, The Box, Los Angeles (2017); Place du Jardin aux Fleurs, Office Baroque, Brussels, as well as numerous group exhibitions including the 2017 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016). Ledare's work has also been the subject of major surveys at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013), and WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2012).
About the Social Psychologist
Yashpal Jogdand is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi. He completed his PhD from School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK, under the supervision of Professor Stephen Reicher. His research focuses on examining how people appraise, experience and respond to social disadvantage, social stigma, or status differences. Yashpal serves on the editorial board of Asian Journal of Social Psychology and Journal of Social and Political Psychology and as Book Review Editor of the journal Psychological Studies. He is a recipient of the Young Psychologist Award by the National Academy of Psychology (India).
