Centre to Periphery and back

We are wondering why you have come from London... It was disingenuous speculation on the part of one of the visiting curators, left hanging in the air at the opening of the Orebro International Videoart Festival 2010. For me, making the trip was a natural response to the invitation by the organisers, Art Video Screening, to attend a long weekend of video art in a small town in central Sweden, nearly three hours from Stockholm by train. It has been in out of the way places that I've had some of my most memorable art experiences. Besides, as far as I know, we don't have an (un-hyphenated) videoart festival in London.

The suggestion that I might be wantonly wasting my time by actually attending (rather than virtually participating from afar) seemed to be endorsed when Lene Crone-Jensen of Kunsthalle Copenhagen, in her speech launching the Festival, noted that technology erodes the distinctions between centre and periphery. But her real point was, that world-class art and international debate can as easily take place in rural Sweden as in the metropolis by exploiting the technology at our disposal. And technology was what drove this festival of moving image, short film and the digital one-liner, all with the particular focus of visual art – video art. Technology and talk. Because, as Crone-Jensen also flagged up, a key motivation for this festival has been to open up a community of visual artists and create a talking shop for this specific practice.

The bi-annual festival is the largest of its kind in Sweden and comprises an intense programme of screenings over three days. As Jonas Nilsen, the Curator of the event explained, a key concept was the invitation to international curators to present a 35 minute programme of works of their choice: 97 videos in all, curated by individuals based variously in Argentina, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, Spain and Sweden. The discretely curated show reels were shown in two key venues: Obrero Museum and the Bio Roxy cinema, providing two projection screens each. This allowed four separate programmes to run on a loop each day.

Some of the curators focussed on work made by their own nationals, but the range featured artists from all over the world. Thus, although the UK was not represented through curatorship, several British artists cropped up in the selections – Michael Day, Sara Brannan, Victoria Lucas and Dagli Zeynep. I'm always fascinated by the cultural flavours that emerge in mixed national exhibitions and this event was no exception. The 255 minutes of single channel videos, varying in length between 0.39 min and 15 minutes, shared a trans-global understanding of the most widely recognised formal references for video art. Prototypical video tropes ran throughout the programme - the talking head, the performing body, the road-movie, the abstracted CGI etc. – but strongly laced with regional identity. As well as referencing video art's historical relationship with performance art, mainstream film narrative and documentary, the selection included a number of works preoccupied with their own (im)materiality. The focus on form as subject, familiar in experimental film, reaches new heights in the age of CGI and there were a number of videos that revelled in software intelligence to the virtual extinction of any other content.

The changing, daily screenings were complemented by two continuous installations by Erik Olofsen (NL) and Etta Säfve (SV) presented by the local art galleries Örebro Konsthall and Konstfrämjandet Bergslagen, respectively. Both artists live and work in the Netherlands and exhibited works at opposite ends of the technological spectrum of screen-based art. Olofsen exploited the digital potential for precision to monumental effect, in his massively slowed, stop-frame observation of travellers on a railway platform, whilst Säfve presented a delicate reflection on globalisation through slide and video projection and hand-made objects.

On Friday afternoon there was a special focus on one of Sweden's pioneers of experimental film, Gunvor Nelson, whose film repertoire dates from 1965. A screening of True to Life, 2006 (38 min), in Bio Roxy's exquisite cinema, was introduced by the artist in Swedish and English, followed by a lecture in Swedish by the academic John Sundhokm. True to Life used the opposite technique to Olofsen. A time lapse study of seasonal growth, filmed in the artist's garden, with a powerful sound track of composed field recordings, the piece is one of a handful of video works in the artist's film repertoire (dating from 1965), largely shot on 16mm film. Watching this work of infinitesimal detail over 38 minutes required a totally different level of concentration to that required for most of the programme, which was characterised by brevity. The inclusion of this screening, for me, symbolised not only a generational shift, but a formal shift that has occurred in the practice of artists who work with the moving image; a shift that seems largely dictated by the ever increasing sophistication of digital technology.

For many artists in the 1960's and 70’s who embarked upon a relationship with the new and democratically available technology, the video camera opened up major possibilities for the political and the very personal. (Gunvor Nelson is one who likes to categorise her work as "personal film".) For me, some of the most memorable contemporary work shown at Orebro International Videoart Festival 2010, links, in my mind, to territory colonised by video-art in its infancy.

Content-driven contributions by artists such as Shwan Dier Qaradaki (IQ/NO), Endre Tveitan (NO), Rimas Sakalauskas, (LT) and Malin Andersson (SE), could also easily be described as short films – in the cinematic sense – by virtue of their narrative or length. Whilst some longer works, such as those by Aurora Reinhard (FI), Katrinem (DE) and Flo Kasearu (EE) felt more firmly allied to video art’s conventions. Shorter works (up to 5min) were in the majority and occupied, what I tend to regard as the right and proper territory of the art-video. Most, with a few exceptions could only be described as "one-liners”. (I wonder if I would feel the same if I engaged with the same short video works in isolation, looped and installed in physical space.) Memorable were works by Tetsushi Higashino (JP), Lora Dimova (BG) and Michael Day (UK) with strong contributions made by the festival curators themselves, Jonas Nilson (SE) and Eva Olson (SE). Notable for its coherence was the programme submitted by Pedro Torres, the curator behind the online gallery stuffinablank.

The curatorial strategy of Art Video Screening set the agenda for this Festival. “Art Video Screening” has now re-branded itself as “art:screen”, but its focus remains on the compilation of multiple short video works with a maximum length of five minutes. This way of packaging video may indeed be an answer to the over-elaborate, clunky exhibitions of video art that have become endemic to biennials and institutions the world over. However, the burden placed on the very short video piece (if it is to survive in the memory) is that, since it has only a minute or so to make its visual point, the point has to be worth making.

The flooding of the art world with the multiple narratives of video in all its permutations – as single screen projections, multi-monitored installations, online or as DVD multiples – presents considerable curatorial dilemmas. However, as a curator, one cannot but respond to the prevailing challenges of screen-based art and making the trip from centre to periphery was an enriching use of time, since, in one location, I was exposed to a huge range of screen-based work from all over the world. My feeling was that art:screen are on to something with their compilations, which is why I invited them to curate a programme of Swedish video artists for exhibition in London. Call me old fashioned, but despite the liberation from place that technology brings, there’s still nothing quite like the cultural experience of seeing art in designated art-space, be it on the periphery or in the centre... Although as the everyone gets excited about the possibilities of IPTV, perhaps in the future (if invited to a similar event) I’ll be asked why I left my sofa.

Notes:

Orebro International Videoart Festival took place between 1-3 October 2010.

art:screen will be exhibiting recent work from Sweden as part of Beaconsfield’s FlatScreen programme, March 2011 with FlatScreen Talk by Dan Lestander on 3 March, 2011

Naomi Siderfin is a director and curator of Beaconsfield, London. Recent moving image projects have included TestBed 1, 2010 (screen-based commissions by Michael Curran and Lucy Gunning, Anthony Gross, Lilli Hartmann, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Dafna Talmor and Joseph Walsh) and the mid-career solo exhibition of video artist Mark Dean: The Beginning of the End, 2010/11.