From February 2017 onwards, KW Institute for Contemporary Art is organizing a series of monthly public talks in collaboration with various institutions and organizations located in Berlin. The series entitled "The Berlin Sessions" explores the fabric of cultural producers in the city. Within this series Videoart at Midnight invites in its issue #90 Gregor Hildebrandt to present Pola Sieverding...
Tobias Zielony is internationally acclaimed as a photographer; we are delighted to welcome the artist presenting us a selection of his work in video and animated film. Zielony began filming with increasing regularity in 2008, and the medium has come to occupy a central place in his oeuvre. He first trained his lens on ...
Mario Rizzi is an Italian artist and filmmaker living in Berlin. His films consider the notions of border, particularly in relation to issues of identity and belonging, and deal with the life of social outsiders, concentrating on collective memories and individual stories, often forgotten or untold. In the last 20 years his films and photographs were mainly focused on the Middle East and on the theme of migration...
Yuri Ancarani's works come from a continuous mingling of documentary cinema and contemporary art, and are the result of a research aimed to explore regions which are not visible in the daily life, realities in which the artist delves in first person...
Andy Graydon’s work explores the interstitial spaces between sound and video. His recordings and layered performances, which integrate diverse field recordings with electro-acoustic compositions, unhinge known sonic territories and open up environments that allow listeners to experience natural or found sound in new ways. Graydon claims a variety of influences ...
Misunderstandings or erroneous interpretations are all factors, which push art forward creating new values and posing new questions. An archive - as every living organism - is alive and subject to incessant change, forever multiplying images of itself. The elements negated and rejected during the process of archivisation, later appear as the dark matter of our subconsciousness - Agnieszka Polska ...
In his video installations, Theo Eshetu brings together his particular grappling with the formal grammatics of moving images (i.e., those of television) with themes from anthropology, such as the meaning and representation of rituals, symbols, and myths. Born in 1958, as the son of a Dutch mother and Ethiopian father in London, he lived for a long time in Ethiopia until he moved to Rome in 1982—his roots form a significant point of his work in which he often refers to a complicated network of cultures.
The Monocle Travel Guide Series- Berlin – a bit of promotion for Berlin, the art scene and Videoart at Midnight with Michel Auder (from 2:06)...
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.