Simon Faithfull’s coolly inquisitive, quietly intrepid, quixotically itinerant art subscribes to the belief that the journey is always more important than the destination. Travelling hopefully (and, as his name suggests, doggedly, unwaveringly, indefatigably), Faithfull’s projects often take the form of a journey; undertaken in the spirit of discovery, and rendered either as a realtime record or as a more extended travelogue.
Companion of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas Michel Auder was one of the first who bought the legendary Sony Portapak to discover a way of filmmaking without scripts and sets. He simply carried his camera around with him, adopting ‘the world as my set and people as my actors’. In the late 1960s and for most of the 1970s he lived in the Chelsea Hotel in New York with his wife, Susan Hoffmann, who was known to him and most others as ‘Viva’, the name that Andy Warhol had given her.
Hiwa K's informal studies in his home town Sulaymaniyah (Kurdistan-Northern Iraq) were focused on European literature and philosophy, learnt from available books translated into Arabic. After moving to Germany in 1988, Hiwa K studied music; specifically he was a pupil of the Flamenco master Paco Peña. The repository of his references consists of stories told by family members and friends, found situations as well as everyday forms that are the products of pragmatics and necessity. He continuously critiques the art education system and the professionalization of art practice, as well as the myth of the individual artist.
Assaf Gruber’s artistic practice, which encompasses and simultaneously deconstructs a variety of media, is both gestural and performative. It is a form of speech – a poetic manifestation of intimacy, the confession of a Beckettian author. Gruber’s simultaneously metaphorical and allegorical configurations in space are landscapes of thought, oscillating between anxiety ...
As it typically happens with Katarina Zdjelar’s videos, we are engaged in the placid duration of a self-enclosed and orchestrated situation. Bound by the tones and rhythms of the music or the spoken word, a temporal vacuum and a sense of expectancy are shaped, which take place in the social space of an extended in-betweenness. Zdjelar’s films work as some form of backstage to the ideological imaginary of these changing, dynamic, and accelerated times of ours. The filmmaker consistently deals with alternative chrono-geographies, denouncing the flaws of the ideological acceleration, while unearthing its unrepresented realms.
Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller have been successfully collaborating since their found footage work, Phoenix Tapes, a high-profile contribution to Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Their works almost always use found footage and operate at the intersection of cinema and visual art. Their film and video works function as distillations of cinematic history, using the principle of found footage to pose questions about the representational level of film imagery as well as to reflect on the methods of depiction and technological conditions of cinema as a medium.
Eran Schaerf, artist with an academic background in architecture, urban planning and photography, and Eva Meyer, philosopher and writer, collaborate on films since 1997. Their practice focuses on architectures of discourse in the intersection of fashion, mass media, language and the built environment and interweaves historical and contemporary political narratives.
Tragedy, co-produced with the Opera North in Leeds, brings forth an altered experience of the infamous opera La Traviata, presenting it in its entirety. Mimicking the framing device of a play within a play, the piece produces a production of production.
In Video Palace, his ambitious installation series, Joep van Liefland invited us since the end of the 90's into an intimite universe where one could resist or embrace the filmic appeal. For Videoart at Midnight, with his 43rd edition of Video Place, the artist puts us under a new kind of (de)pressure. Will you endure the claustrophobic fornication with the screen?
Since 2012 the Berlinische Galerie has been acquiring the Videoart at Midnight Edition for its collection. To mark Gallery Weekend 2016, the Berlinische Galerie now presents Videoart at Midnight, using it's IBB Video Space to screen a versatile selection of those high-calibre works from the collection.
Dafna Maimon’s work constitutes an exploration of small-scale communities that challenge stereotypical constructions. Mainly cinematic and performative, her work focuses on understanding and studying the unclear limits of identity, the body and human emotional landscapes.
Jeremy Shaw works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience. Often combining and amplifying strategies from the realms of conceptual art, ethnographic film, music video, mystical and scientific research, Shaw proposes a post-documentary space in which disparate ideals, belief-systems and narration are put into crisis.
After the Islamic revolution in 1979 the young contemporary art scene in Iran has developed beyond what was considered compatible with the new Islamic order. But right now - despite continuing limitations - the Iranian art scene is flourishing, all signs in the middle east art scene seem to point to Tehran.
Christian Falsnaes‘ “There and Back Now” wird am Freitagabend bei der 71. Ausgabe von “Videoart at Midnight“ im Babylon Kino gezeigt. Den Film entwickelte der Künstler beim Stöbern in seinem Video-Archiv. Nur dieses eine Mal soll ein Publikum ihn zu sehen bekommen. Falsnaes’ Werke treten mit den Zuschauern in Kontakt, ...
In his performances, Christian Falsnaes tests collective obedience by giving instructions to his audience. Thereby, Falsnaes’ performances form analytical and social experiments that demonstrate how easily an initially hesitant audience can, through instructions and group dynamics, be emotionally and critically affected.
As conclusion of this year’s program - an exuberant clash of film, live concert and performance!
As in Zeyen’s video, the narrative found itself enhanced through its containment into a closed space. Here, not only are the characters absent but so are the bright colours of the furniture : leaving only the anthropophagic white emptiness. It is the space itself that reflects the filmic emotions.
An dieser Stelle bietet sich endlich die Gelegenheit auf das Projekt Videoart at Midnight hinzuweisen. Die Initiatoren Olaf Stüber und Ivo Wessel geben uns einmal im Monat die Möglichkeit im Babylon in Mitte bei freiem Eintritt (oh ja!) Videokunst in Kinosesseln zu sehen, anstatt im Vorbeigehen im Museum oder in ...
Olaf Stüber, a leading proponent of moving-image art in Germany, is co-founder of the monthly showcase Videoart at Midnight. A cult event among Berlin art enthusiasts, it invites artists to present their work in a free and open forum that welcomes not only video but performance and conversation. After introducing this program, Stüber will be joined by Ulu Braun, an artist who has been featured in Berlin.
Amie Siegel, who is back in Berlin to premiere a new work for the exhibition Wohnungsfrage at the HKW presents at Videoart at Midnight The Architects (2014), one of her very recent works, followed by The Sleepers (1999) an earlier work shot on 16 mm.