A Short History of Dutch Video Art is an exhibition of works by 30 video artists from a plurality of cultures and cultural backgrounds who have been working and living in The Netherlands in the last 30 years. They summarise some of the most remarkable moments in the history of Dutch video.
At a time when "foreigners" and cultural diversity have become the centre of cultural and political discussions in The Netherlands and Europe, it has become a fundamental cultural task to acknowledge the achievements and the contribution of these artists to the mapping and creation of an artistic field over 30 years.
The history of Dutch video art cannot be understood, nor explained, without the contribution of artists from a diversity of cultural backgrounds living and working in The Netherlands. The most active practitioners, the first spaces showing video work, and the first teachers in Dutch Academies of Fine Arts, were artists from a variety of backgrounds. Their contribution has enlarged and enriched the meaning of 30 years of Dutch art. During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, they introduced new artistic perspectives, organised exhibitions and artistic events, produced television programmes, published magazines, and passed on their knowledge and engagement with the medium of video to future generations. They contributed largely to artistic life in The Netherlands, producing works in which new questions and issues, unexpected perspectives and unusual discourses became established. In enlarging both the subject and the content, they brought new sensibilities to the Dutch artistic arena.
The Gate Foundation is presenting a programme of 30 single-channel works covering those three decades. The exhibition has been organised in cooperation with the Netherlands Media Institute. The selection of works has taken into account the works of some artists presented in the exhibition at the Netherlands Media Institute in order to offer a comprehensive panorama and to ensure coverage of fundamental moments in the history of Dutch art.
The programme includes numerous landmarks in the development of Dutch video art by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Miguel-Angel Cardenas, Ulises Carrión, Claudio Goulart & Flavio Pons, Raul Marroquin, Nan Hoover, David Garcia and Annie Wright, Elsa Stansfield & Madelon Hooykaas, Heiner Holtappels and Christina Linaris-Corridou; as well as more recent works by Babak Afrassiabi, Tiong Ang, Dan Oki, Nasrin Tabatabai and others.
The exhibition charts the diversity and variety of artists who have developed Dutch video art over 30 years without border constrictions, in a medium that has proved to have no boundaries. It opens up a wider connection with the transcultural, and provides an open field of discussion in which the 'artistic' interrogates the 'cultural'. The exhibition is intended to contribute to establishing new parameters that could help to produce a better understanding of the works and the historical field in which they were produced.
Together with the exhibition, three audio-visual historical documents made in the 1980s will be presented concerning the question of artists of diverse cultural backgrounds working and living in the country.
This exhibition is a contribution to Dertig jaar Nederlandse videokunst (Thirty Years of Dutch Video Art), the celebration of Dutch Video History initiated by the Netherlands Media Institute (Montevideo -Time Based Arts).
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