VIVA Festival. Vital International Video Art Festival

6 april, 2008 - 27 april, 2008
Place
Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Curatorship
Niels van Tomme,Claire Cooke, Pim Trooster, Elisa Uematzu, Charlie Peel and Sandra Thomas
Isaac Julien. The Attendant, 1993
Isaac Julien. The Attendant, 1993

The VIVA festival began as an international network for the exchange of ideas between artists, curators, galleries and institutes devoted to contemporary art around the world, with a special emphasis on the creative possibilities of the audiovisual arts. Most video artists at one time or another have had to face the impossibility of showing their single-channel video artworks exactly as they were conceived, given that ‘visitors’ to exhibitions often disrupt the piece’s viewing time. In light of this, VIVA has established a festival format that respects the original time and rhythm of the works. Without any discourse uniting the different pieces, which were selected solely on the basis of their quality, intellectual rigor and capacity to transform the viewer’s point of view, the single-channel video works presented at the VIVA Festival must be viewed as independent works.

Divided into two programmes presented in four sessions, the VIVA Festival selection includes works like Violent Incident (1986) by Bruce Nauman (Fort Wayne, 1941), Monodramas (1991) by Stan Douglas (Vancouver, 1960), Kumano (1999) by Mariko Mori (Tokyo, 1967) and Fragmenten uit ‘Backpacking’ (2006) by Douwe Dijkstra (Holland, 1984).