Atelier Nord presents film- and video art at the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad
As the first part of our initiative to present video art and film art through the new Norwegian digital cinema system, Atelier Nord presents a program curated by Susanne Ø. Sæther at the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad, Friday 18.6 at 12:00
This program is a presentation of younger Norwegian artists who have made their mark on the national and international scenes through their film and video works, along with selected individuals that are recent graduates. All have studied art, the majority at Norwegian art schools. While some work across both the film and art scenes, for most of them the gallery space is a more natural screening location than the cinema. In these galleries film and video can happily take their place as part of a larger installation comprising several video projections, the spatial presentation of which is fundamental. And yet an increasing number of film and video artists desire optimal screening conditions, with full control of light and sound, meaning traditional gallery spaces are more frequently resembling the darkened cinema theatre. It might seem, therefore, that the institution- ally imposed division between film and art is, in some areas, beginning to break down.
Atelier Nord wishes to contribute to the exploration and the challenges around this dividing line between art and film. The program at The Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad is one part of this ambition.
The program will be introduced by a curator and is organized into two parts. These highlight two recent and central trends in Norwegian film- and video art, both of which have a resonance in film- and video history.
The first part of the program, Images, consists of works that, in different ways, categorize the medium of film and video according to its inherent characteristics and/or media culture’s manner of production and circulation of images and ideas. In the 1960s both avant-garde film and the early forms of video art were concerned with exploring the unique qualities of their respective mediums. In the 1970s video art in particular criticized television-generated images of for example, gender roles, by appropriating material from the television medium. There has been a resurgence of interest in media’s production of images, thanks to digital technology and easier access to archive materials. This part of the program includes a critical investigation of notions about particular places, such as Paris and America, a fiction film about what happens when the interview object refuses to play along with the host in a radio show broadcasted live, as well as more formalistic and abstract studies of the relationship between text, sound and image.
The second part of the program, Bodies, exhibits works in which the human body has been the object of investigation. Historically, the body has been a central theme in video art since the end of the 1960s, particularly in relation to performance and feminist art. Amongst other things, video’s potential for direct transmission allowed the viewer to interact with their own picture in real time. This established a new understanding of the relationship
between vision, body and movement. Feature films have also given a new view of the body, through the deconstruction into close-ups of gestures and facial expressions laden with significance. Today the human body has become an object of control, analysis and consideration, through performance reality programs, as well as biometric identification. This part of the program shows recent works exploring, for example, the abnormal body, the body as entertainment, and how the camera’s potential for capturing unusual positions and perspectives allows the relation between the whole and its parts to be investigated.
Atelier Nord has initiated a pilot project in connection with the development of a new infrastructure for digital cinema in Norway. The aim is to establish a more permanent, decentralized way of screening film and video art, as well as communicating these types of art forms to a broader national audience. The program White Cube, Dark Space, at The Norwegian Short Film Festival is the first stage in this project, supported by Arts Council Norway and the Norwegian Film Institute.
Curator : Susanne Ø. Sæther
Producer: Ivar Smedstad