VIDEONALE.20 | 11.4. – 18.5.2025

Kunstmuseum Bonn and various locations in the city

The Prologue begins on 16.11.2024

The Videonale – Festival for Video and Time-Based Arts is celebrating its 20th edition from April 11 to May 18, 2025 (Opening: April 10 / Opening Days: April 11-13, 2025). We would like to take this edition as occasion to look back at our previous festival editions and their artists and to trace and present their lines of artistic development and networks into the present. Together with a selection committee, we will choose around 30 works by the more than 1,200 artists who have been presented since 1984 in the context of the Videonale to participate in the VIDEONALE.20 festival and its composition. We are dispensing with the international competition for participation in the Videonale for this edition.

The Videonale has taken place since 2005 in the Kunstmuseum Bonn as a place for the presentation and mediation of art, with its specific architecture and its points of reference relating to content; an environment that challenges us again and again in a positive sense and poses questions of how we ourselves would like to act at this place: what new solutions for the presentation of audiovisual art, both scenographic and artistic, can be developed in relation to the spatial circumstances of this location? How do we as a festival wish to shape encounters with audiovisual art here? How can we make the museum space more permeable and create new contact zones between works, artists, and a diverse public? What new interrelationships can we produce between the museum and the surrounding urban environs? In this, we are guided by our deep conviction that the varied and current themes, aesthetics, and work methods of audiovisual art can serve as an invitation for many to interact with this artform and its content at entirely distinct levels.

As in past Videonale festivals, the exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bonn will also be a principal component of the VIDEONALE.20 and the starting point of the festival happenings. The exhibition in the museum will be expanded upon during its six-week duration through permanent and temporary satellites (exhibition and event locations) in the city.

A varied festival program developed in cooperation with the participating artists and other actors accompanies the exhibition. Our goal is to develop a variety of events and contact zones that offer various forms and formats for approaching the interdisciplinarity of film, literature, sound, performance, and theater inherent in many audiovisual works. The Prologue beginning November, 16th will provide residents of Bonn and all those interested with the opportunity to approach and prepare for the anniversary exhibition.

More information will follow soon here, via our newsletter and on Instagram.

Festival Archive

One of the association’s most important functions is organising an international festival of video and time-based arts. Since it first took place in 1984, the VIDEONALE – Festival for Video and Time-Based Arts has been held every two years in Bonn - since 2005 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The participants included such pathfinders as Dara Birnbaum, Lynn Hershman, Klaus vom Bruch, Gary Hill, Keren Cytter, Marcel Odenbach, Bill Viola and Christian Jankowski. The heart of each festival is the exhibition with entries to the international competition as well as a festival programme with artist talks, lectures, presentations, screenings and performances.

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