From June 2024, Videonale and Kunstmuseum Bonn will take a reciprocal dive into the archives and video art collections. These will each house an extensive collection of both early and contemporary video art, which will be on display in the small auditorium of the Kunstmuseum until the opening of VIDEONALE.20.
Until November 3 Confessions with an Open Curtain (2011) by Eli Cortiñas will be on view.
Take television. What happens? A string of electrons, sound and picture impulses are transmitted through wires into the air. The TV camera is the disintegrator.
Your set unscrambles or integrates the electrons back into pictures and sound.
– Yes, but this is different.
This short dialog sequence from a 1950s science fiction film (“The Fly” by Kurz Neumann) is repeated again and again in Juha van Ingen’s short video clip until the image and sound finally dissolve into noise. What happens here? Van Ingen interprets the film quote, which describes the creation of image and sound on the television screen, backwards, so to speak: while the television set reassembles the individual scattered signals and electrons it receives into a coherent image with sound, van Ingen copies these images from one video cassette to another until they again dissolve into individual signals and electrons that are too vague for the device to decode in any meaningful way. This work was shown as part of the VIDEONALE.5 (1991) at the Bonner Kunstverein, at a time when the presentation of VHS tapes was still standard practice.
With his image experiment, van Ingen is representative of an early generation of video artists who artistically explored the nature of the video image in comparison to other forms of image production and perception. The comparison with the production of film images is certainly obvious, but comparisons with the creation of images in painting or photography are also quite virulent. What does an image consist of and how much information do we need to recognize it? In view of today’s possibilities of digital image production, this question arises again in a completely different way.
Every two years since 2005, the Videonale − Festival for Video and Time-based Arts has presented an exhibition of international video art, accompanied by a diverse festival program, at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. From April 11 to May 18, 2025, the 20th Videonale will take place in the museum and at various locations in the city of Bonn; the festival is thus celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Over 300 video works from 40 years of festival events are permanently accessible in the Videonale online video archive: archive.videonale.org
All information about VIDEONALE.20 can be found at videonale.org