Monday, March 16, 2009

VIDEONALE 12



A collage of pictures taken from glossy magazines develops as a mystical vision of life and decay - dark, macabre and elegant all at the same time: This video, by Aline Bouvy and John Gillis, residents of Brussels, is one of 43 selected works that the VIDEONALE 12 will be showing from 26th March to 26th April 2009 in the Kunstmuseum Bonn. 1445 current video works from 74 countries were inspected by the 6 members of the jury to make the selection. "This boldness must exist for the selection, and so I think it is extremely important that there are festivals such as the VIDEONALE. It has always been exciting to see what is coming next," says Professor Wulf Herzogenrath, Director of the Kunsthalle Bremen, and a German pioneer on the field of videos.

With a special exhibition, the VIDEONALE also casts a glance at its 25-year history: From each of the VIDEONALE competitions hitherto, curators Susanne Hinrichs and Georg Elben have selected a work to represent the competition of the year concerned. In each case, this "historical" work is accompanied by a current video by the artist concerned. Within the 3-day programme from 26th to 28th March, the VIDEONALE will be focusing on current tendencies in video art, reinforced by more than 30 projects by art students from the whole of Germany, to which the 28th March is devoted, with interventions in the Kunstmuseum Bonn and at various other locations in central Bonn.

The VIDEONALE - founded in Bonn in 1984 - is the organiser of one of the oldest video festivals in the world. Since then the festival has grown steadily, and has developed in this field into a leading institution for current video art. Since 2004, the VIDEONALE has been using the premises of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, making a meaningful complement to the video pioneers from the bequest of Ingrid Oppenheim, who as an art collector and patron of the arts laid the ideal foundations of today's VIDEONALE in the late 1970s.

The VIDEONALE 12 is sponsored by the city of Bonn, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW, the Stiftung Kunst der Sparkasse in Bonn, the LVR, the RheinEnergieStiftung Kultur, the consulate general of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Cine Plus (technics sponsor), Langenbach Cuisine Modern, the chief sponsor being the KfW-Bankengruppe.




No comments: