Interplay
September 16- November 3, 2024
Eli Cortiñas, Confessions with an Open Curtain, 2011, 05:25 min
We see a woman from behind. Off-screen a woman’s voice says: “When was it? How long? It seems a lifetime ago.” A second woman replies: “Why don't you start at the beginning?”. Cut. In the next scene a camera tracks over the cushions on a couch, to the accompaniment of Irving Berlin’s “What’ll I do?” Cut. A blue-grey curtain is drawn and a woman’s voice says: “Let me tell you what I said when she was born.” The picture changes to a light blue curtain. The woman continues: “Alright I said. I'm glad it's a girl and I hope she'll be a little fool. It's the best thing a girl can be in this world - A beautiful little fool.” The camera repeatedly scans over the women’s backs and the gently billowing curtains. Their facelessness makes the characters seem to merge into a single person.
The initial shots make it clear that this collage-like work with its audio-visual snippets make no attempt to have a plot in the filmic sense. The expectations of a normal cinema goer are sorely tried, but are, in the end, systematically guided towards a filmic message. In her collage of found-footage, Cortiñas achieves a precise consideration of the clichés in films which present a certain image of women.
Text: Till Fabian Bender, Catalogue VIDEONALE.14
Interplay
Small Auditorium at Kunstmuseum Bonn
Videonale is showing Eli Cortiña's video work Confessions with an Open Curtain (VIDEONALE.14) as part of the Interplay series, in which we will be immersing ourselves in the Videonale archive and the video art collection of the Kunstmuseum Bonn, each of which houses an extensive collection of both early and contemporary video art, until the opening of VIDEONALE.20.
Every two years since 2005, the Videonale − Festival for Video and Time-based Arts has presented an exhibition of international video art, accompanied by a diverse festival program, at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. From April 11 to May 18, 2025, the 20th Videonale will take place in the museum and at various locations in the city of Bonn; the festival is thus celebrating its 40th anniversary.
Over 300 video works from 40 years of festival events are permanently accessible in the Videonale online video archive: archive.videonale.org
All information about VIDEONALE.20 can be found at videonale.org
June 4 - 30, 2024, Juha van Ingen, (Dis)integrator, 1992, 3:40 min, courtesy the artist
A short dialog sequence from a 1950s science fiction film (“The Fly” by Kurz Neumann) is repeated again and again in Juha van Ingen's short video clip until the image and sound finally dissolve into noise. What happens here? Van Ingen interprets the film quote, which describes the creation of image and sound on the television screen, backwards, so to speak: while the television set reassembles the individual scattered signals and electrons it receives into a coherent image with sound, van Ingen copies these images from one video cassette to another until they again dissolve into individual signals and electrons that are too vague for the device to decode in any meaningful way. An earlier version of this work was shown as part of the VIDEONALE.5 (1991) at the Bonner Kunstverein, at a time when the presentation of VHS tapes was still standard practice.