Exhibition 21/02 – 14/04/2019
Festival Program 21/02 – 24/02/2019
Opening February 20, 2019, 8pm
In the exhibition of VIDEONALE.17 a total of 29 artistic positions, selected from more than 1.100 submissions from 66 countries by an international jury are presented under the title of REFRACTED REALITIES. Please have a first look to a selection of trailers.
In optics, “refraction” refers to the bending of a beam of light, a change in direction which occurs at the moment when it passes from one medium to another. Through refraction, the light wave alters course, changing the way we perceive the objects it illuminates in the process. This optical deviation requires us to repeatedly correct our gaze, comparing the beginning and end points of our perception with reality, and bringing the object we see clearly into focus. In its figurative sense, refraction refers to a critical reflection on the means and channels of visualization, and by extension the possibility of a rearticulation of our view of things – how they are, were, or apparently always have been.
Not only since the big question relating to the veracity of documentary images has been raised, have we been faced with the latent question of which reality we are actually talking about when we invoke it. The debates of the past years on the loss of confidence in (digital) image material and many other forms of documents that establish facts have only increased the downward spiral of doubt. Never before has it been easier to withdraw into a filter bubble made up of allegedly fact-based micro-realities serving one’s own opinions. The view shaped through any type of camera lens—be it photo, video, or film—has always played a crucial role in the way we constitute the world. In this area, the diversity and rapidity of producing gazes has also clearly increased in recent years. The theme of this year’s Videonale, REFRACTED REALITIES, emerged from the awareness of an ever more complex and contradictory state of reality that moreover defines itself less and less by including and increasingly by excluding other concepts of reality.
Artists VIDEONALE.17:
Monira Al Qadiri, Eric Baudelaire, Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, Mareike Bernien & Alex Gerbaulet, Andreas Bunte, Shu Lea Cheang, Marianna Christofides, Chto Delat, Mike Crane, Saara Ekström, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Mahdi Fleifel, Johan Grimonprez, Laura Huertas Millán, Su Hui-Yu, Sohrab Hura, Adam Kaplan & Gilad Baram, Stéphanie Lagarde, Maryna Makarenko, Deimantas Narkevičius, Stefan Panhans, Laure Prouvost, Morgan Quaintance, Maryam Tafakory, Eva van Tongeren, Tris Vonna-Michell, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Andrew Norman Wilson, Tobias Zielony.
v17.videonale.org
Videonale e.V.
c/o Kunstmuseum Bonn
Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2
53113 Bonn