The contents of this programme have been put together quite intuitively while on a lookout for parallels between technological video change and imagination. Trying to define works by five artists, resulted in the programme’s title, Videoimagination. How do produced images reflect our imagination and what impact do they have on its shaping? Thinking of visual memory as a never-ending film and seeking to identify connections between the conscious and the unconscious with video technology, we called the programme Videoimagination, emphasising a mutual relation between video and imagination, technology and gaze. 

All works in this programme explore various spaces — digital, experiential, observational. Work by Marge Monko, Dear D, reflects sensitive and intimate connections not only between two people, but also between inner feelings and technological design. Polak van Bekkum’s The Ride takes place in the virtual world of Google Earth, but the emotional experience occuring in the real world challenges the differences between the two. Broersen and Lucacs use digital devices in Forest on Location to recreate the Białowież forest which is facing extinction, whereas in Allison Henriquez’s Nocturnal Motion the spectator becomes suspended in the experience and immersed into a dreamlike state. Mariano Blatt and Eduardo Williams’ film, Parsi creates one more videoimagination with its poetic space which exists neither in 360-degree captured Guinea-Bissau nor in a poem about that which does not exist. 

Curated by Milda Januševičiūtė and Monika Lipšic

 

Marge Monko
Dear D, 8’, 2015.

The voice over text of the video is based on a fictional love letter which touches upon different aspects of contemporary love. The text includes several references to the writings of Chris Kraus, Siri Hustvedt and Andre Gorz, as well as the well-known song ‘Something’ by The Beatles and sociological research by Eva Illouz. The video is recorded on the computer screen and shows the process of writing the letter, interrupted by browsing the web and exploring image files. 

Marge Monko lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. She has studied at the Estonian Academy of Arts and at HISK (Higher Institute for Contemporary Art) in Ghent, Belgium, and works with photography, video and installation. Her works are inspired by historical images and influenced by theories of psychoanalysis, feminism and visual culture.

Polak Van Bekkum
The Ride / De Rid, 12’, 2019

It’s a clear and starry night. Road markings are lighting up with reassuring regularity. We only see the view through the windshield, but from the sparse dialogue we know we are in the company of a man and a woman and that they’re on an island. They’re on their way to a place where something bad had happened long ago. The visual landscape of impersonal Google Earth satellite images counterbalances the emotional charge of the short, low-key sentences and the sound of amplified heartbeats.

Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum work together as an artist-couple under the name PolakVanBekkum. Rooted in the history of Dutch realistic landscape depiction, they express personal experiences of moving and space. Their projects are often informed by collaborations with participants, be it humans, animals or the rays of the sun.

Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács
Forest on Location, 12’, 2018

Forest on Location is a virtual replica of the last remains of the primeval forest Białowieża. The 11,800 year-old Białowieża forest, located in the border region between Poland and Belarus, has been a wellspring of European imagination for centuries, forming the backdrop for legends, myths and fairytales. Throughout its history the forest has been assigned various roles: from a cultural and historical construct to a fought-over economic resource and a political hot potato. Despite its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its continued existence, until recently, was threatened by extensive logging. Using footage shot on location, Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen created a digital ‘back-up’ of the disappearing forest, converting two-dimensional photographic documentation into a three-dimensional environment that forms the backdrop for the performance of Iranian opera singer Shahram Yazdani. 

Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen are artists based in Amsterdam. Much of Broersen and Lukács’ practice is informed by the questions deeply rooted in the interest in and the workings of media and technology, intertwined with the politics of depicting landscapes, culled from political, mythological, (art)historical and filmic sources. 

Allison Henriquez
Nocturnal Motion, 4’, 2019

Nocturnal motion explores the enigmatic nature of deers and how they’ve captured the collective imagination with their metaphorical essence. In many cultures, a deer is a symbol of spiritual authority. One of the reasons for this could be its physical characteristics –– its gaze, its agility, its speed and its antlers –– which inspire associated values and symbols in the imagination of humans. A sacred animal with the spirit of gentleness and softness, a messenger, a shaman, personifying conventional ideas of femininity.

 Allison Henriquez is a poet and video artist. She is presently pursuing a Master’s degree in moving image at the Sandberg Instituut. She has worked at the International Film Festival Rotterdam for a number of years. Her practice seeks to examine the relation between poetry, moving and sound. Currently she is interested in exploring poetic memory, a practice which eschews conventional notions of linearity and accuracy in order to uncover the human subject’s intricate relationship with a past that cannot be fully known.

Mariano Blatt and Eduardo Williams
Parsi, 23’, 2018

The Go Pro serves as a pendulum in the space created in the film. Like a nib of the pen, it writes as it follows people, bodies and their movements in impossible angles, it travels with protagonists in cars and skateboards, through the streets and avenues of Guinea-Bisseau. In this film, artist Eduardo Williams and poet Marianno Blatt extend every expressive possibility of video poetry, establishing a strange and immersive correspondence between the rhythms of pop music and the visual measures of the camera, which are brought to life by the characters.

Eduardo Williams (b.1987, Argentina) is a filmmaker and artist whose works explore a fluid mode of observation, looking for shared relations and spontaneous adventures within both physical and virtual networks.

Mariano Blatt (b.1983, Argentina) is a poet, literary editor and co-director of Blatt & Ríos, an independent publishing house. His ongoing poem No es is a lifelong writing project.

How do moving images work, create and participate in history? One of the main films shown in the exhibition, which also inspired the title of the entire Kaunas International Film Festival – Harun Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution – indicates that moving images not only represent or reflect reality, but also actively create it. It is impossible to think about the moving image and its power to act without considering the role of the mass media. This role is assessed with irony and staged both by the classic work of media art – the documentation of the US media art collective Ant Farm performance Media Burn, and by Dovilė Aleksaitė’s Hypnosis Session, which reminds of a widespread cultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union – broadcasted hypnosis sessions. 

How we consume images affects not only history-in-the-making, but also the vision of the past and its reproducible worlds. Max Grau analyzes his own narratives, evoked by the scenes of the popular Hollywood film Grease. His work Craving for Narrative is about the “second-order nostalgia”, the nostalgia for nostalgia of certain images. Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács deconstruct the image of an idyllic landscape occurring throughout the history of cinema. The work by Allison Henriquez poetically conveys a nightly vision in nature. Meanwhile, the work of Forensic Architecture in Triple-Chaser presents its study and video as a tool for retrieving and tracing stories from a variety of perspectives.

 

Participating artitists and works:

Dovilė Aleksaitė, Hypnosis Session, 2015
Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975
Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, Establishing
Eden, 2018
Harun Farocki, Videogramme einer Revolutionen, 1992
Forensic Architecture, Triple Chaser, 2018
Max Grau, Craving for Narrative, 2015
Allison Henriquez, Nocturnal Motion, 2019
Ulijona Odišarija, The Dying Swan, 2016

Architecture: Vladas Suncovas

 

Sponsored by Lietuvos kultūros taryba, Collection Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Nordic Culture Fund

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