The Düsseldorf based foundation imai – inter media art institute was founded in 2006 in order to establish an institution in Germany dedicated to the distribution and preservation of media art and associated activities.
The imai distribution program is among the foundation’s core tasks and seeks to foster video artists and their works and to make them known to the public. With these purposes in mind imai lends and sells around 1,500 audiovisual works by 120 international artists. These works, valuable both as art and as historical documents, provide a wide overview of the development of video art from the pioneering era of the 1960s until the present day.
imai continually adds new audiovisual artworks to its distribution program. For blinkvideo Darija Simunovic (imai Collection & Distribution) has curated a program including works created in the 2000s.
Myriam Thyes newest animated work was inspired by a piece by the Dadaist artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp which was created as she fled from the atrocities of the World War II. As part of his controversial and much discussed project about “Jewish Life in Munich”, Marcel Odenbach had high school students read, in front of the camera, literary texts about the deportation of Jews by the National Socialist regime. Jan Verbeek turns to Super 8 aesthetic to celebrate the idealised freedom of children playing in nature. Colourful recordings of natural elements by Stansfield/Hooykaas are entwined with philosophical views of the world from a Zen Buddhist perspective. Van McElwee carries us off to the poetic and mysterious locations in Mexico while Thomas Kutschker’s "Shooting Locations" are simply mystifying. Marty St James’s kaleidoscope of a video portrait is dedicated to a ballet dancer. Limits of physical capacity are explored in a video recording of the performance by Mwangi Hutter and Freya Hattenberger. Ulrike Rosenbach’s video and the accompanying performance was inspired by the mourning singing in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Works on blinkvideo:
Freya Hattenberger: lipsyncsickshit, 2015
Jan Verbeek: Open Sky, 2003
Marcel Odenbach: Deutschstunde. Jüdisches Leben in München 24.08.2006, 2006
Marty St James: Adagio No 8, 2011
Mwangi Hutter: For Children, 2006
Myriam Thyes: Sophie Taeuber-Arps Fluchtlinien, 2015
Stansfield/Hooykaas: Re:vision, 2005
Thomas Kutschker: Shooting Locations, 2009
Ulrike Rosenbach: Ticinium – Shawl of Sadness, 2012
Van McElwee: Mexican Dream, 2015
For further information please visit: www.stiftung-imai.de