ATHENS – Gioula Papadopoulou, art director of Video Art Miden, is a guest curator of Videonale, one of the most renowned and historic video art festivals (based in Bonn, Germany) for a program with video art works selected from the Videonale archive, in the frame of the online project ‘Perspectives’. The program is entitled ‘The space Between’ and will remain accessible at the website of the Videonale archive: https://bit.ly/3hDcQWJ.

Videonale – Festival for Video and Time-Based Arts is one of the oldest and most historic festivals for video art in Europe and internationally. Since its first edition in 1984, it takes place every two years in Bonn and it is considered one of the most significant video art festivals, which has hosted the work of many pioneers in the field of video art, such us Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Gary Hill, Tony Oursler, Marcel Odenbach, Bill Viola, Robert Cahen and others. For many of these artists, Videonale was the first chance to present their work to an international public. To this day Videonale has followed its founding principle of highlighting the current trends in time-based arts and presenting them to the general public, focusing mostly on the advancement of aspiring young artists, along with established positions of video art.

Recently, Videonale initiated a new series of thematic programs based on its historical archive, under the title ‘Perspectives’. In this project, artists and curators from various contexts present online their selections from Videonale’s archive, based on a personal thematic/conceptual axis. The archive consists of video narrations from all parts of the world that often differ strongly in terms of form and artistic expression. Every guest curator is invited to select from the available online works of the archive, in order to create a program which reflects a personal focus.

In the fifth edition of the series, Gioula Papadopoulou discovers the ‘space between’ within works that express an emotional state marked by dichotomy and contradiction:

“We try to balance between reality and fantasy, between actual and virtual imagery, between the natural and the artificial,” she said. “Our lives are somehow surrealistic by default, as we live in an endless loop of countless contradictions: movement and stillness, fastness and slowness, sociability and loneliness, optimism and pessimism, consciousness and unconsciousness, meaningfulness and emptiness, creativity and destruction, freedom and subjection, spirituality and materiality, presence and absence, utopia and dystopia. And, at the end, it feels like we are balancing between existence and non-existence, in every step of the way, each and every moment.”

“The temporality – and the dreamlike ambiguity – of our existence reflects on all aspects of the human activity and experience, which is floating somewhere between remembering and forgetting,” Papadopoulou continued. “Every now and then, we might think that we have captured the meaning of life and the essence of our being but at the same time we also realize that our perception of cosmos falls into deception and illusion. The selected works explore the fluidity of the human experience in many different ways, focusing on our relation with nature and with ourselves and on our perception of what we live and of the things that surround us.”

The participating artists are: Viktor Brim, Sanaz Sohrabi, Jasmin Bigler & Nicole Weibel, Stefanie Ohler, Sabrina Labis, Erik Levine, and Andrew Norman Wilson.

More information is available online along with links for viewing the selected works: https://archive.videonale.org/en/perspectives  and https://verein.videonale.org/.