— screenings, presentations, discussions
— financially supported by the Province of Limburg and the City of Maastricht
— part of Kunsttour
The Jan van Eyck Academie presents a three-day programme on video art. Internationally renowned artists, curators and academics scrutinize topics regarding video art – its past and current state of affairs. In addition, for the first time an elaborate programme is set up with video productions from the Jan van Eyck archive that cover a time span from the seventies till the present day. The programme offers both experts and the public at large a unique chance to get acquainted with the rich tradition of Jan van Eyck video production.
92 films equals 30h32m52s equals 35 years of video production
— screenings
The Jan van Eyck video collection, containing more than 300 films, inspired several current and former (advising) researchers and guests to curate a programme of screenings. Based on memories, personal preferences or specific themes they compiled an extensive programme with films from the Jan van Eyck archive and external productions. The aim is not to give a historical overview, yet the programme shows videos from as early as 1972, when the medium was still to be explored, till recent times.
Curators are: Orla Barry, Raphaël Cuomo & Maria Iorio, Antony Hudek, Raul Marroquin, John Murphy, Sophie Nys, Stéphane Querrec, Steve Rushton, Jennifer Steetskamp, Imogen Stidworthy, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Marina Vishmidt & Emma Hedditch and Astrid Wege.
Programmme from minute to minute
Case histories: former researchers, artists stored in the Jan van Eyck archive — presentations
In the mid-eighties the Jan van Eyck Academie established itself as the leading centre for experimentation and production of video art in the Netherlands. Over the years, many participants/researchers have realised and developed video work at the academy. They are now invited to talk about this work in relation to their career.
— interview by Robrecht Vanderbeeken
The videos, installations and photographs of Cel Crabeels revolve around the concept of the void. The void is regarded as a meaningful surrounding that allows for multiple interpretations. Crabeel’s spatial work often incites the public to interact. Several layers of reality are correlated to the physical experience of space. Conversely, in his video work the surroundings play a lesser role; peripheral elements are systematically erased to such an extent that only a minimal spatial testing ground remains. Cel Crabeels is mainly interested in tangential events; he sets them apart and gives them central focus, concentrating on their essence. Crabeels’ work is an embodied reflection on the possibilities of perception and investigates art as an influential force.
Cel Crabeels was researcher at the Fine Art department of the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1997 to 1999. He exhibited in many museums throughout Europe (Museum Ludwig-Forum Fur Internationale Kunst, Aachen; MuHKA, Antwerp; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Witte De With, Rotterdam). Crabeels has been lecturing at Leeds Metropolitan University, Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik, Sint-Lukas Academie, Brussels and Post Sint Joost, Breda.
Case history: Johan Grimonprez
— conversation with Mark Nash
Johan Grimonprez makes use of the aesthetic strategies of contemporary mass media to explore the phenomena of identification, voyeurism and fatalism, and at the same time he propagates a critical, self-reflective distance. His early video work already revealed a fascination for obscuring the divisions between representation and reality, fiction and documentary, private and public, critical observation and autobiography. In Kobarweng or Where is your helicopter? archival images and field recordings are juxtaposed with fragments of texts from the stories of the local population of Pepera (New Guinea), bringing back the memory of a colonial past. By integrating his own recordings and indicating a personal context, Grimonprez is always considering his own position as an observer and a storyteller. In his award-winning and frequently shown Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), archival images and quotations are combined with his own filming of intimate and autobiographical trajectories and accounts. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y relates the ‘unofficial’ history of airplane hijackings and associated terrorism, or rather the unauthorized biography of the relationship between media and terrorism in today’s ‘catastrophe culture’. By investigating the evolution of the way hijackings are represented, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y frames the complicity between television and history. Video and television have closed the gap between observer and history. The dissolution of the distinction between reality and fiction, between real and fake, again form the theme of Looking for Alfred (2004), which won the 2005 International Media Award and was conceived as an homage to Hitchcock, but also as an exploration of an imitation culture. A few scenes document the quest to find a perfect Hitchcock double.
Johan Grimonprez studied photography and mixed media at the academy in Ghent and spent several years in New York at the School of Visual Arts (1992) and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1993). He was researcher at the Fine Art department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 1995 and taught at the department of plastic arts at the University of Paris (1995-96) and at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1998-2004).
— screening
In 1999, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub finished their film ‘Sicilia!’, based on a novel by Italian writer Elio Vittorini. They discuss their new project with a group of students and the discussion turns into a lesson about cinema. Pedro Costa decided to portray the two film makers during their workshop at the Studio National des Arts Contemporains. Danièle Huillet is in charge, Jean-Marie Straub measures the editing room with giant steps. Their discourse is continually interwoven with theory and practice. They consider the meticulous work put into some sequences of their film. However, filming their work is not enough; it is also necessary to take their thoughts into account, and the hesitations that break the rhythm. When talking to the students, these are the elements that are first to arise. Pedro Costa captures the process of editing their feature film, ‘Sicilia!’ in ‘Où gît votre sourire enfoui?’ Costa’s film illustrates the particularity of the filmmakers’ methodology through his particular interest in capturing the allegorical in the quotidian. As the filmmakers alternately engage in recounting personal anecdotes, gentle marital sparring, and professional ruminations over their collaborative cinema, Costa’s portrait is an affectionate, humorous, and indelible image of profound kinship and creative symbiosis told from the privileged intimacy of irascible, enduring romantics, intellectual peers, social activists, obsessed cinephiles, idealists of all ages, and innovative, mutuallyinspiring artists.
— screening
— round table with Pedro Costa, Catherine David, Chris Dercon (moderator)
Increasingly, filmmakers are invited to take part in art events such as biennales and exhibitions; it would be interesting to ascertain why that is. Does video art suf-fice? Is it too abstract, too esoteric, too unprofessional, too much turned in on itself? Or is it that filmmakers experience a kind of freedom when they operate in an art context – the freedom to think beyond the structures, methods and forms we ascribe to ‘cinema’? Perhaps the cutting edge of art is more seductive and rewarding than the fringe area of cinema? Why do filmmakers who enter the white cube often make their work into installations? How do they deal with this spatial dimension? Why is the shift from white cube to black box much more uncommon and hardly ever successful?
Register at madeleine.bisscheroux@janvaneyck.nl
— round table with Corinne Castel, Johan Grimonprez, Mark Nash, Dirk de Wit (moderator)
Video is an increasingly accessible, high-quality and affordable medium. Yet, for the artist to attain professional levels of production and distribution involves complex and often problematic negotiation. In this round table discussion we will look at how aspects of commissioning, financing structures, production, distribution and archiving have developed over the past decades, how they work now, where they might be heading and how they affect current artistic production. We will also discuss the effect of the Internet and web streaming on artistic methods, the curating and reception of video art.
Register at madeleine.bisscheroux@janvaneyck.nl
— with a comment by John Murphy
In his early career (1996-1997) Pavel Braila primarily wanted to establish direct communication with his audience and as such focused on performances and installations. Living and working in Chisinau (Moldova) at the time he was concerned with the position of the artist and the societal role and cultural significance of his artistic practice after the communist era, with the wish to enter into a dialogue with western cultural discourse. During his research period at the Jan van Eyck Academie Braila decides to return to Moldova to shoot Handmade song (2000) in Popeshtii de Jos, a small village were his grandparents lived. Road (2000) depicts a nightly drive on a bumpy road to Bucharest that ends at dawn. Shoes for Europe (2002) clearly illustrates the boundaries between East and West by showing the changing of train wheels from the Russian to standard gauge. Baron's Hill (2004) records elaborately the fantasy homes built by the city’s powerful (Roma people of Soroca, Moldova) to be used for entertaining guests, rather than residing.
Pavel Braila studied at the Technical University of Moldova and the State University of Moldova. He was researcher at the Fine Art department at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2000-2001) and went to Le Fresnoy, Studio Nation des Arts Contemporain in Tourcoing. Braila had solo exhibitions at Kunstbuero in Vienna and at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris. He has participated in Documenta 11 in 2002, and the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005. Braila’s work was part of numerous group exhibitions – at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam and the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Illinois.
— interview by Rein Wolfs
In a strongly visual and spatial manner, emphasising the experience of the viewer, Knut Åsdam uses sound, film, video, photography and architecture to work with the politics of space and the boundaries of subjectivity. Often these concerns are related to themes of dissidence and an analysis of space in terms of desire, usage and history. Four categories are essential to Åsdam’s work: speech, living, sexualities and struggle. Speech: His video, film and radio work shows his interest in how subjectivity is formed through speech acts — either through actual speech or through other forms of self-articulation — like clothes, behaviour and routines. Living: Åsdam is interested in the performative aspects of architecture, place and social dynamics, not as formal exercises but rather as aspects that relates to an everyday. Sexualities: the plurality of sexual and gendered experience is central to the way Åsdam construct characters. The subjects in his work are always assumed as gendered and sexualized subject. Finally, struggle is important to Åsdam, not only in a political sense, but also as a way of understanding how ‘speech’ (subject formation), ‘living’ (the meaning of the everyday) and ‘sexualities’ (the meaning of our bodies) are things we have to affirm or contest in our lives and that involves psychological and social processes.
Knut Åsdam has internationally exhibited, broadcast and published for the past 10 years. He exhibited at Tate Britain, Venice Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, PS1 and Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. Feature articles on his work were published in Artforum, Grey Room, Untitled Magazine and many more. He was researcher at the Fine Art department of the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1992 till 1994.
— lecture by Jennifer Steetskamp
From the seventies onwards, the Jan van Eyck Academie has played a central role when it comes to applying new technologies to the context of fine art. It was one of the first institutes in the Netherlands where artists began to experiment with video. From the eighties onwards, these activities were structurally organised via the then ‘video workplace’. In an attempt to run through the history of video of the seventies and the eighties, Jennifer Steetskamp (Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA), will give a short introduction of the history of video activities at the Jan van Eyck.
— lecture by Mark Nash
Mark Nash will consider the role of moving image art works in the museum and gallery today as well as the longer-term significance of movement in contemporary art. He will show excerpts from a range of contemporary work as well as installation shots of a number of recent exhibitions including his own ‘Experiments with truth’. Head of Department of the Curating Contemporary Art department, Mark Nash is a well-known specialist in contemporary fine art moving image practices, avant-garde and world cinema. He was co-curator of ‘Documenta 11’ (2002) and film curator of the ‘Berlin Biennial’ (2004).
— presentation
In her interdisciplinary works Isa Rosenberger investigates to what extent alternative perspectives affect our seeing of reality. She usually finds her working field in city space and urban societies, where contemporary social, political and cultural issues – employment, migration – are manifest.
Working with people in a way that requires their participation to create an artwork – whether it is a pictorial form of expression, an installation or a film – has become a conventional art practice. The methods that Isa Rosenberger has developed in this field of production are distinguished by a high degree of interest in and personal appreciation of the intellectual and creative potentials of her project partners. Against this background, Isa Rosenberger rejects the frequently used term ‘participation’ and speaks instead of ‘temporary alliances’, which she enters into with others for the duration of a project. (Margarethe Makovec)
In her presentation Isa Rosenberger will show fragments of two of her recent videos. While Sarajevo guided tours – a journey to a real and imagined place (2002, 00:03:00) refers to the format of a tourist’s gaze and experience, Isa Rosenberger subverts the idea of a guided tour by examining the question of how places are invented. The video shows element of both documentary videography and subjective parathion. In the video A monument for the women’s centre (The making of) (2005-2007, 00:27:00) the setting up of a new monument is the starting point and leitmotif but at the same time the reason and occasion for drawing the situation of women to the public’s attention. Historical flashbacks – a GDR commercial or excerpts from the first colour film containing material from Wolfen, parts of a radio interview broadcast by MDR, radio station in East Germany or a regional TV broadcast covering the making of the new monument – show up the discrepancies between the old and new identifications.
Isa Rosenberger studied Fine Arts at the Academy of applied Arts in Vienna and at the Fine Art department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in 1994-1996. Since 1992 she has exhibited widely in Austria and abroad. The monograph Isa Rosenberger: Von der Wirklichkeit der Bilder / About the reality of images was published in 2006.
Radiostar. Popstar research project
— project by Megan Sullivan (researcher Fine Art 2006-2007)
Radiostar. Popstar research project was carried out in Berlin at the change of the millennium. It included 12 live 'actions to displace depiction', the production of 2 albums, 3 singles, a line of radio star products, an autograph collection, audience questionnaires, a pile of notes, literature and drawings, and a manifesto. Radiostar, the duo mega Holiday and keyboardist Oliver, created a basic lo-fi pop band to infiltrate otherwise inapproachable spaces and for creating disparate situations within them. Not comfortable in the role as pop stars, it was for the artists nonetheless necessary to perform to be in the position of observer. The documentary video Radiostar (2007, 00:30:00) depicts their various activities.
Henk Wijnen: Driehoeksverbranding, 1982 (installation, 00:18:51)
Three pyramids — one black, one gray and one covered in reflecting plastic foil — are form a triangle on a plain in the rolling landscape of Limburg. On 17 April 1982 a cultural ceremony was held during which the pyramids were set fire to and burned. Henk Wijnen: ”The pyramid is burnt, the triangular chain is broken. The force the pyramids once emanated – partly generated by their geometrical positioning – is undone and slowly returns to the soil. They have become fully part of the landscape. They no longer stand out! (...) A meditative event.” This performance was recorded on video and the burnt remains of the pyramids were exhibited under a bell jar. 25 years on, Henk Wijnen has made another installation. This time round, the video is shown on a monitor that has a glass covering.
For many years, artists, designers and theoreticians have produced books at the Jan van Eyck: autonomous art works, experimental design editions, volumes of essays, catalogues, books on video art and magazines. These books can be purchased at the book market. Price tags vary; they start at 1 euro.
The Jan van Eyck Video Weekend is financially supported by the Province of Limburg and the City of Maastricht and takes place in the framework of the Kunsttour (www.kunsttour.com).
On the occasion of the Video Weekend the library presents a special selection from its collection: publications on the history and theory of video art as well as books made by or about the artists of which work is shown. It enables the visitors to elaborate and philosophise on the videos they have just seen. Most of the publications can be borrowed by IHOL-pass holders.
Language: English
Admission is free.
Contact: Kim Thehu