The conceit is simple: Twenty-eight strangers share a room on day three of a Group Relations Conference. They discuss their emergent interpersonal dynamics while a film crew documents them. Waves of hostility, humor, suspicion, and pain shake the group as the identities and histories of the participants are uncovered in real time. The film reveals the contingency of group dynamics on interpersonal difference—in age, gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, personality—creating a captivating, and at times unsettling, microcosm of a society attempting to communicate.
This screening of The Task is presented in conjunction with Authority, Emotion, and Exclusion, a film series and Group Relations Conference (the same kind of event depicted in The Task). The Conference will occur Jan. 26-27 and is accepting members through Dec. 15. The application is available at authorityemotionexclusion.com.
Leigh Ledare, M.F.A. Artist, filmmaker and educator, lives and works in New York City. Ledare’s artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, and are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has made multiple projects drawing from the lens of Group Relations. He is a faculty member in the Visual Arts M.F.A. programs at Yale University; Columbia University; and New York University.
