The sarcastic account of the assassination of five Spanish politicians between 1870 and 1973 is mixed with the narration of five short stories by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated by five skillful pencil artists. A documentary, a video essay, a collage, a provocative experiment where various pop culture figures and icons perform unexpected cameos. The macabre joke of a jester. Never more.
“From This” is a permanent cycle. This video intended to be timeless in its original action plan, to be played constantly in a particular place, with a TV, a player and a power generator.
Art Punks is a song directly attacking the antics of famous conceptual body artists of the day.
The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today's world.
Religions are like cactus. They look like flowers, but with bare blades.
Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other.
The art of experiencing an individuals creativity and the way their minds form the movement to express themeselves;the best people will always help bring out your individual creativity and your way of expressing your mind.
a visualization of a poem telling a story of making a piramid out of a mountain
The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.
An inspiring 75min DIY documentary film on new art and the young artists behind it. It was all filmed on the heat of live action of the first NOVA Contemporary Culture Festival, July and August 2010 in São Paulo, Brazil.
Untitled Fall '95 takes the form of a wryly humorous video diary of an art school student (sharply played by Bag) in the midst of “finding herself” in New York City. We can see the diarist physically and emotionally evolving throughout her eight semesters in the Big Apple. Such onscreen “confessionals” stem from the first major example of reality TV, The Real World. Interspersed throughout are commercial-like vignettes that further critique what it’s like to live in the world today. In Untitled Fall '95, Bag displays a profound self-awareness that evokes empathy on behalf of the viewer, despite her work’s glaring artificiality.
John Baldessari is one of the pioneers of conceptual art, which revolutionized contemporary art in the 1960s, and is still a profound influence on young artists today. The film shows John Baldessari in all aspects of his work: as an artist in his studio, with the technicians he collaborates with, as a teacher interacting with his students, as a passionate observer of the contemporary scene and visiting the Biennale in Venice as well as the Basel Art Fair. This film provides us with insights into the work of a radically modern-thinking artist and sharpens our perception of the often inaccessible world of contemporary art.
In this program video artist Gary Hill uses a number of his pieces to investigate otherness and ambiguity, dislocation of the senses, the boundary between words and comprehension, the physicality of text, and figurative interactivity.
Like a Wave in the Sea
A compilation of light cones of electric torches.
The Nightwatch documents an action realised by Alÿs in 2004 in which he released a fox into London’s National Portrait Gallery in the middle of the night and used the museum’s CCTV system to follow its movements. The institution was chosen because unlike other institutions it does not conceal its CCTV cameras.
Guy Ben-Ner, one of Israel's foremost video artists, gained international recognition with a series of low-tech films, starring his family in absurdist settings carved out of their intimate spaces and their everyday surroundings. Many of his videos are inspired by screenplays for films, folktales and novels. Analyzing these literary and cinematographic passages allows him to exploit the conventions of film narrative: how to tell a story, captivate an audience through a tale, sustain a degree of tension and entertainment, and so on. At the same time, he corrupts the magic of fiction by openly showing us the entrails of everything he records, without worrying about revealing the tricks of the trade. A large part of his filmic oeuvre features a conglomeration of cinematic and literary references which the artist quotes, adapts or interprets. Ben-Ner self-referentially links the great themes and their literary, cinematic and artistic realization.
From his photo-text canvases in the 1960s to his video works in the 1970s to his installations in the 1980s, John Baldessari’s (b.1931) varied work has been seminal in the field of conceptual art. Integrating semiology and mass media imagery, he employed such strategies as appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality, and text/image juxtaposition. With an ironic wit, Baldessari's work considers the gathering, sorting, and reorganizing of information. “Something that is part of my personality is seeing the world slightly askew. It’s a perceptual stance. The real world is absurd sometimes, so I don’t make a conscious attempt, but because I come at it in a certain way, it seems really strange,” Baldessari says in this interview with Nancy Bowen. A historical interview originally recorded in 1979 and re-edited in 2003 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund.