VIDEONALE ON TOUR
Various Artists
Curator: Tasja Langenbach
STATEMENT
VIDEONALE on Tour is an exhibition presenting 6 video works by Lotte Meret Effinger (DE), Randa Maroufi (FR), Stefan Panhans (DE), Lucy Pawlak (UK), Julia Scher (USA), and Susanne Wiegner (DE), that were part of VIDEONALE.16 Festival. The videos, curated by Tasja Langenbach, the Artistic Director of Videonale Bonn since 2012, were shown at Athens Digital Arts Festival, in May 2017.
VIDEONALE.16 – a video and time-based arts festival – took place at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, in 2017, between February 17th and April 2nd and the edition’s topic was ”PERFORM”. Videonale was founded in Bonn as a festival in 1984 and since this time takes place every two years. It is one of the oldest festivals for video and time-based arts in Europe with a special focus on young and upcoming international artists.
In its earliest forms, performance as an artistic gesture was an act of liberation – a rejection of the role models and expectations of the art establishment. Yet today, performance has increasingly come to stand not for freedom of expression, but rather, for the imperative to act. Be it through our constant interaction with digital devices, within which we leave behind traces of ourselves; or through the relentless demand placed on individuals to present themselves online, and to optimise themselves as economic subjects – in all of these ways, our lives, whether consciously or unconsciously, have become ongoing performances. Our movements increasingly take the form of choreographed displays in public spaces, over which we have only limited control.