Video Art

  • Moyra Davey – Les Goddesses (2011)

    2011-2020ExperimentalMoyra DaveyUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    In Les Goddesses, filmed almost entirely in the artist’s New York apartment, Moyra Davey draws parallels between her familial experience and the family of 18th-century writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

    Leafing through postcards, book pages, and her own photographs as she talks, Davey reflects on varied approaches to photography and film, such as planned versus unscripted recording of reality and the passage from private to public realms with a camera. Davey punctuates her narration with thoughts on writing as she simultaneously listens to and recites a script based on her 2011 essay, “The Wet and the Dry.”Read More »

  • Fudong Yang – Mingri zaochao AKA Dawn Breaking (2018)

    Fudong Yang2011-2020ChinaExperimentalVideo Art

    Quote:
    Dawn Breaking is the opening chapter of Yang Fudong’s Museum Film Project. The idea of the series first conceived while Yang worked on his solo exhibition in Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in 2005. After more than a decade, the first episode has been fulfilled this year in Shanghai Long Museum. Yang set the background of “Dawn Breaking” in Song dynasty which was prominent for achievements in art, culture and science. He also extracted nearly three hundred sentences of Nietzsche’s Quotations as the exclusive script. Live performance in the context of ancient oriental history intertwines with the quotes of desire, and power from the German philosopher. Read More »

  • Claude Autant-Lara – Fait-divers (1923)

    Claude Autant-Lara1921-1930ExperimentalFranceShort FilmVideo Art

    Young Autant-Lara’s (1901-2000) avant-garde debut, made a decade before his first feature and two decades before his breakthrough. It features his mother, who was a famous actress, as well as Antonin Artaud, who was a friend of the family.
    The films circulates around a triangular love drama with a lot of faux avant-garde effects: filming only hands and feet, rotating camera, dream sequences expressing the tensions between the protagonists etc. etc. Given that this was made many years before Un chien andalou and most of the titles that can be found in Kino’s box sets, this was pretty cutting edge in 1923.Read More »

  • Shirin Neshat – Tooba (2002)

    Shirin Neshat2001-2010IranShort FilmVideo Art

    Quote:
    Her poetic two-channel video installation Tooba is based on the Koran, in which Tooba, the sacred tree of paradise, offers shelter and sustenance to those in need. Neshat’s video places a woman within a groove in the trunk of a large fig tree, symbolising its soul. They stand, alone, in a stone-walled garden set in a mountainous landscape. Men and women draw near and enter the enclosure, seeking refuge, as the Tooba-woman disappears into the Tooba-tree. The piece is ambiguous. Who has agency? Is it the crowd, who ‘invade’ the garden or the tree-woman who draws them towards her like a magnet? Tooba is dedicated to Iranian writer Shahrnush Parsipour, whose novel Women without Men concerns five women sojourning in a garden, one of whom is transformed into a tree.Read More »

  • Shirin Neshat – Rapture (1999)

    Shirin Neshat1991-2000IranShort FilmVideo Art

    Quote:
    Rapture is an installation of two synchronized black-and-white video sequences that are projected on opposite walls; large in scale, they evoke cinema screens. Working with hours of footage and a team of editors, the artist constructed two parallel narratives: on one side of the room, men populate an architectural environment; in the other sequence, women move within a natural one. The piece begins with images of a stone fortress and a hostile desert, respectively. The fortress dissolves into a shot of over one hundred men—uniformly dressed in plain white shirts and black pants—walking quickly through the cobblestone streets of an old city and entering the gates of the fortress. Simultaneously, the desert scene dissolves into a shot of an apparently equal number of women, wearing flowing, full-length veils, or chadors, emerging from different points in the barren landscape.Read More »

  • Brian Eno – Thursday Afternoon (1984)

    1981-1990Brian EnoExperimentalUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    “I see TV as a picture medium rather than a narrative medium. Video for me is a way of configuring light, just as painting is a way of configuring paint. What you see is simply light patterned in various ways. For an artist, video is the best light organ that anyone has invented.”

    “I started working with video in the late 70’s … as a way of making paintings. Rather than dramas or stories or all the things that are usually connected with video, because of its background and its connections with theatre and film. I wanted to connect video with pictures and with picture-making, and began by making pieces that were very long, slow, slowly changing examinations of, for instance, a landscape – or in my case the skyscape of Manhattan, where I was living at the time.”Read More »

  • Danny Perez & Animal Collective – Oddsac (2010)

    2001-2010Animal CollectiveDanny PerezExperimentalUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    Opening with torch-wielding villagers and a wall bleeding oil, this experimental film attaches vivid scenery and strange characters to the wonderful melodic wavelengths of the band Animal Collective, revitalizing the lost form of the “visual album.”Read More »

  • Lynne Sachs – Lynne Sachs: Exploring Women, Culture, Science & Myth (2005)

    Lynne Sachs2001-2010ExperimentalUSAVideo Art

    This DVD collection presents two of Lynne Sachs’ earlier films with several more recent media works — all of which explore themes of women, culture, science & myth. The creative as well as intellectual inner workings of these projects are revealed for the first time in the context of an elaborately conceived, yet accessible disc.

    BIOGRAPHY OF LILITH (35minutes) updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist. In conjunction with the film, the DVD offers a personal introduction to Jewish Kabbala.Read More »

  • Bahar Noorizadeh – After Scarcity (2018)

    2011-2020Bahar NoorizadehPoliticsSwitzerlandVideo Art

    In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.Read More »

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