Wild Videos: The Videonale – Festival for Contemporary Video Art in Bonn
Now for the first time, on its thirtieth anniversary, the VIDEONALE.15 kicked things off under the aegis of a specific theme. On display currently under the title “The Call of the Wild” at the Kunstmuseum in Bonn are 38 video works from 19 different countries (the show ends on April 19, 2015), which were selected by a jury from among 1200 submissions. On the day the Videonale opened, a different jury selected one video from among the exhibited works to receive a 5000 euro prize from the KFW-Stiftung.
For #32, curator Doris Krystof, a member of the prize jury, had a careful look through the wilderness of the festival, and discusses, among other things, this year's prize-winning video, Shelly Nadeshi’s “A Hidden Quiet Pocket.”
The festival title, “The Call of the Wild,” chosen by Tasja Langenbach, Artistic Director of the Videonale, which already led to some preliminary thematic presorting among submissions, follows a certain developmental logic pursued by the Videonale. Ever since it took up residence in the Kunstmuseum Bonn 10 years ago, the festival has transformed itself from a weekend off-event launched in the 1980s into a veritable museum exhibition lasting nearly two months. As a thematic exhibition, the VIDEONALE.15 focuses on a specific aspect, and has assembled a topically relevant accompanying and educational program, thereby generating an intricate framework for its reception by critics and the public alike.
Moreover, it has proven productive to work – as now in Bonn – with an open category such as “the wild” capable of bringing together and unifying the most divergent facets: the animalistic and the untamed, the anarchic-rebellious, but also the dreamlike, the Other, and the foreign – a broad thematic arc!
That this thematic arc is well-captured in the exhibition catalog is made clear by the Foreword, which is preceded by a citation from Jack Halberstam, an expert in English literature and one of North America's best-known theoreticians in the area of Gender and Queer Studies: “The wild and the fantastic,” claims Halberstam, “enter the frame of visibility in the form of an encounter between the semi-domesticated and the unknown, speech and silence, motion and stillness. Ultimately, the revolutionary is a wild space where temporality is uncertain, relation is improvised, and futurity is on hold.”
Through Halberstam, Tasja Langenbach conceives of the wild as an “explosive in-between place where categories are found in the state of disintegration, while new categorizations have yet to be discovered, and perhaps never will be.”
Already by virtue of the acute technical, image-political, and commercial implications of the moving image, this formulation represents a telling metaphor for characterizing international video production over the past two years. That the use of a topical limiting criteria represents a useful filter is seen quite pragmatically in the reduced number of videos submitted. Prevailing in all previous years, which lacked any thematic delimitation, was a genuinely wild jumble of international video art, whose sole criteria of acceptance was that they should be no more than two years old.
The Wild in the Presentation and the Architecture
The wild as a thematic category at the VIDEONALE.15 also reverberates through the presentation of the 38 videos. The catalog explains: “The exhibition architecture of the VIDEONALE 15, designed by Ruth M. Lorenz of maaskant Berlin, also takes up this sensation of uncertainty and interrogates habitual view axes and perspectives by means of the spatial arrangement of the displays.”
In fact, the exhibition is characterized by a nice mix of image and sound. There is a contrast between projections on large, slanting, suspended panels and smaller image monitors installed at angles at floor level, which are distributed in the space either between or behind the larger projections. Visible simultaneously from any position within the presentation are at least three, and up to ten flickering video images. There is no recognizable rationale for the proximity of one work to its neighbors, nor for having one video appear on a monitor and another as a large-scale projection.
Far from offering adequate seating options for viewing the videos, which last up to two hours, the simple stool-stelae found scattered throughout the exhibition spaces manifest an aesthetic preference for minimalist furnishing. And with regard to the always awkward overlapping of soundtracks found in video exhibitions in general, the leveling effect of this unifying exhibition design generates a kind of medial wilderness. Despite a variety of efforts, despite all of the symposia, panels, and experiments in the area of exhibition architecture for video exhibitions seen in recent years, the problem remains, evidently, untamable.
At first glance, then, the eight museum galleries in Bonn seem striking, multiperspectival, open, seem to invite us to explore the videos without prescribing any particular direction. But at second glance, the display seems to resemble an overloaded bargain bin through which one must rummage diligently in order to locate the desired item – which, it is hoped, one can then take in with some degree of concentration. Not that one is tempted, like Roger M. Buergel at documenta 12, to evict all video works from the exhibition galleries and confine them to theaters, but it may be that a reduced number of video installations in the exhibition galleries, and alongside them, a screening program in a soundproofed room outfitted with benches, armchairs, or sofas, might provide a more appropriate environment for the reception of such artworks.
To Each Her Own Wildness: the Artists at This Year's Videonale
That a high priority must be accorded to fostering the specific reception of each individual work, that videos cannot be taken in as large ensemble of “video art,” that each individual tape must instead be perceived on its own terms and in contradistinction from the others – all of this becomes quite clear at the VIDEONALE.15, where wildernesses given shape by the various artists is articulated in the most diverse conceivable ways.
For example in the form of wild dogs that band together in some godforsaken battleground in the Arabian desert (Wim Catrysse, MSR); or as the subtle menace of a potential megaquake that may strike at any moment along the San Andreas Fault in California (The Otolith Group, Medium Earth); or the heavy metal band, configured as an exhausted heap and raked with colorful spotlights, whose final signs of life take the form of intermittent, earsplitting guitar riffs (Koen Theis, Death Fucking Metal); or the uncanny artificiality of the men, crowned with blazing aureoles, who are impelled to extremes of self-optimization (Constantin Hartenstein, Alpha Male); or the insistent approaches made to young men and boys in a shelter in Mumbai (Udita Bhargava, Imraan, c/o Carrom Club); or refugees from Syria and Lebanon, stranded in an overgrown park in Athens (Mahdi Fleifel, Xenos).
Prizewinner at The VIDEONALE.15: Shelly Nadashi
And finally, the prize-winning video, “A Hidden Quiet Pocket” by Shelly Nadashi, a native of Israel: in this body performance piece gone off the rails, which includes a decent injection of capitalism critique, the plasticity of language, movement, and meaning grows into a totally frenzied interaction between the service provider, a masseuse, played by the artist, and her wealthy client, played by her roommate.
With each kneading movement, the price of a private apartment in the best part of the city, the topic of discussion between these two unequal women, rises continuously, while the repeated invocation of the celebrated “piece of cake” epitomizes the simple rule that some people have everything, and others nothing – “bigbong.”
Despite my remarks on the presentation, I would strongly recommend a visit to the VIDEONALE.15. And please give your attention to the fantastic accompanying program! By the way, you might want to attend the artist’s talk featuring prize-winner Shelly Nadashi and the art critic Jennifer Allen at the Temporary Gallery in Cologne on Friday March 6 at 7 pm. On view there among other works is the prize-winning video “A Hidden Quiet Pocket.”
Text: Doris Krystof
The thirtieth birthday of the Videonale is actually already its 31st. The founding of the video festival in Bonn actually took place in 1984. The milestone birthday reached this year is being celebrated at the Bonn Kunstmuseum and on the Videonale website under the motto “30 Years – 30 Voices.” Journalists, authors, and curators take a backward glance at the history of the festival, reflecting on it with reference to a historic Videonale work.
The main exhibition “The Call of the Wild” at the Kunstmuseum Bonn will be on view until April 19, 2015.
www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de/nocache/ausstellungen/aktuell/info/ex/videonale15-2359/
