Barbara Campbell

Barbara Campbell (born 1961) is an Australian performance and installation artist.

Campbell was born in Beaudesert, Queensland in 1961.Since 1982 Campbell has worked with the specific physical and contextual properties of a given site, be it art gallery, museum, atrium, tower, radio airwaves or on the World Wide Web, in developing and presenting her works. Campbell studied film under Alan Cholodenko, Rex Butler and Keith Broadfoot at Power Dept of Art History, University of Sydney 1987. She completed a Master of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney in 1998.

Campbell's influences come from peers working in the Sydney Super 8 Film Group, 60s minimalists film makers such as Stan Brakhage. Campbell also recognises the influence of French film semioticians Metz, Baudry, Bazin, Baudrillard and Bellour. In 1987 Campbell took a course in Super 8 at the Tin ShedsArchitecture Faculty, University of Sydney and conducted numerous workshops organised by Sydney Intermedia Network with artists/peers such as Andrew Frost, Anthony Foot, Nick Meyers.

Campbell progressed from working in Super 8 medium and later discovered that video was a way of integrating other image sources into the performance frame. She used video to set up live video feedback so that the camera and the monitor could be used to create a dialogue between performer and audience. Campbell explored mediums that became domesticated and therefore accessible to the amateur artist.She was particularly interested in organisations or artist-run initiatives using experimental media.

Campbell used text as the starting point for her large-scale installation Conradania, based on Joseph Conrad’s acclaimed 1899 novel The Heart of Darkness set on the Congo River in Africa.Francis Ford Coppola based the film Apocalypse Now on Conrad's novel.

When Campbell read Notes (1979) written by Eleanor Coppola, the wife of Francis Ford Coppola, which records her observations of the making of the film, she noted that her daughter's reaction to the film set in the Philippines was like Jungle Cruise Disneyland.

It is from this point of juxtaposition between the real and the unreal culture to another that Campbell began the solitary performative work of Conradania.

Campbell spent eight weeks typing out The Heart of Darkness word for word on twenty 15  ft lengths of Chinese rice paper. She then filmed the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, which is played on a small screen in front of the hanging rice paper. (Griffith University Art Collection)

Campbell incorporated video into her performances in galleries, museums, and festivals. Her most recent work 1001 nights cast (2005-2008) is written by hundreds of collaborators using video to live web-stream performances through the project's dedicated website:

The work was inspired by The Arabian Nights, the famous anthology of stories and how storytelling was a means of survival; the young woman Scheherazade stalls her execution by weaving an endless story of such intrigue that the King Shahriyar eventually grants her a reprieve.

Her work is held in major national collections.