On the occasion of the public opening of Wulf Herzogenrath’s archive at the Akademie der Künste, Franziska Stöhr chairs a discussion between Wulf Herzogenrath and Ulrike Rosenbach. Looking back at central events in the art and exhibition history of video, they discuss early video art exhibitions, large scale archival projects and will ask where does the medium stands today.

Wulf Herzogenrath lives in Berlin and Cologne. From 1973 to 1986 he served as director of Kölnischer Kunstverein. He organised his first video art presentation under the title “projekt ’74” in 1974 and collaborated on documenta 6, 1977, and documenta 8, 1987. From 1989 to 1994 he was head curator of the Nationalgalerie Berlin and from 1994 to 2011director of the Kunsthalle Bremen; since 2006 he is member of the Akademie der K, whose archive received his video materials as a donation.

Moderated by Franziska Stöhr, scholar of fine arts. Her dissertation is the first foundational publication on the history of the film and video loop, which Stöhr develops in an interplay of technical, art, and exhibition history. She works as a freelance curator.

Olaf Stüber Festival Director

Marie-France Rafael Concept and Organisation of the Symposium
Anna-Catharina Gebbers Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin
Kathrin Becker Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

The year artists started working with video can be dated precisely: 1965. Today, video long counts as a canonic medium. But what do the history of this artistic medium, its present, and especially its future possibilities look like?

Dieter Daniels is Professor of Art History and Media Theory at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB) in Leipzig since 1993. From 2017 to 2019, he is fellow at the Gutenberg Research College (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz /Mainz Academy of Arts) working on a Transdisciplinary Video Theory Reader.

Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montréal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice.

Claus Pias is Professor for the “History and Epistemology of Media” at the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM) at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, as well as the director of the DFG-funded Institute for Advanced study “Media Cultures of Computer Simulation” (MECS) and the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC).

Moderated by Marie-France Rafael. Holding a phd in art history, she is currently a researcher at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel, in the area of Spatial Strategies. She also teaches regularly at the University of Fine Arts Münster. In 2017, she published the monograph Reisen ins Imaginativ. Künstlerische Displays und Situationen at Walther König, Cologne.

In the era of continuously developing digital tools, video still exist as a definition, whilst the technology has long become different. The panel seeks to open a discussion on the concept of the medium. Does it still make sense to think in formal, media-specific and media-related categories or have we moved beyond the medium as a recognisable and classifiable entity? And what kind of environment could be the ideal to welcome artworks engaging with a different and “permanently new” condition we have entered?​

Marco Roso (DIS.art) is part of DIS, a collective based in New York who have been encouraging other artists and theorists to participate in DIS Magazine and various exhibitions and networked practices since 2010. In 2016, the collective served as curators of the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. 2018 they launched DIS.art – a streaming platform for edutainment.

Artist Ed Atkins lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen. Recent solo exhibitions include Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and MMK, Frankfurt/Main (both 2017), The Kitchen, New York (2016), and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015). His novel Old Food was published in November 2018. Atkins is currently a gues professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.

Conceptual artist Julieta Aranda lives and works in Berlin and New York City. Her explorations span installation, video, and print media.

Moderated by Andrea Lissoni, Senior Curator at Tate Modern, London. From 2011 to 2014 he served as a curator at Hangarbicocca, Milan. Lissoni co-founded the international festival Netmage in Bologna (2000 – 2011) as well as V-Drome, an online screening programme for artists and filmmakers.

How are time-based media (re)presented in the exhibition context? Displays serve to organize and install objects in a space, but projection, installation, and exhibition grow together beyond the individual media. Has art possibly taken on the character of a display?

Erika Balsom is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). Balson frequently contributes to publications such as Artforum and frieze.

Omer Fast is a visual artist working in film and video installations. His narrative work involves documentary and fictional subjects. His solo exhibition „Talking Is Not Always the Solution“ was shown in Berlin at Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2016/17. Since 2001, Fast lives and works in Berlin.

Inke Arns is director and curator of HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) in Dortmund. She has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993.

Moderated by Marie-France Rafael. She holds a phd in art history and is currently a researcher at the Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design, Kiel, in the area of Spatial Strategies. She also teaches regularly at the University of Fine Arts Münster. In 2017 she published the monograph Reisen ins Imaginativ. Künstlerische Displays und Situationen.

In a lecture performance, artist Dan Graham discusses three of his crucial time-delay works: Present Continuous Past(s), a stage set for a Glenn Branca musical performance at the Kunsthalle Bern, and an unrealized project for local public access cable TV. Furthermore, Graham also shows three examples of low-tech-pioneer video art by Darcy Lange, Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman to counter the current fashion of video art as spectacle.

Dan Graham is an american artist who is showing extensively in America and Europe. Notable exhibitions include documenta 5 (1972) and the Venice Biennale (1976). In 2009 a large retrospective of his work was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Gabriele Knapstein is art historian and curator, and has been living in Berlin since 1985. From 1995 to 2003 she worked as a freelance curator for the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa), amongst others. Since 2003, she has been researcher, and since 2016, director of the Nationalgalerie in the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin.

The earth’s subterranean layer has long been an object of fascination to artists, archaeologists, and technologists as a meeting point of the planet’s past and future. This lecture addresses contemporary video art’s habitation of the underground—as a space of enclosure and exclusivity, and of capitalist extraction—redefining it as one of radical inclusivity and commonality, and as a site through which to explore the material histories and futures of media.

Leo Goldsmith is a writer, curator, and teacher based in Amsterdam and Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Artforum, art-agenda, Cinema Scope, and The Brooklyn Rail, where he was film editor from 2011 to 2018. He is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Peter Watkins with Rachael Rakes. Goldsmith has lectured on media and film at New York University, Brooklyn College, Harvard University, and the New School.

Literary scholar and media theorist Friedrich Kittler confessed that it took him a long time to understand the concept of media archaeology. Instead of focusing on a linear historiography of media, Kittler suggests a “recursive history.” Siegfried Zielinski also opts for an experimental, nonlinear scientific working method. What does this other, unconventional historiography of video art look like? And how does the medium of video reflect its own history and hybridization?

Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and Wigeland Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Recent books include The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016) and On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture (2007/2009).

Siegfried Zielinski is Michel Foucault Professor for Media Archaeology and Techno Culture at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas Fee. Until 2016 he was Professor for Media Theory/Archaeology and Variantology of Arts and Media at the UdK Berlin, as well as Director of the Vilém Flusser Archive at UdK. He is the author of Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders (1985) and Archäologie der Medien (2002), amongst others.

Moderated by Ana Teixeira Pinto, writer and cultural theorist. She is a lecturer at the DAI (Dutch Art Institute) and a research fellow at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Afterall, Springerin, Camera Austria, e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, frieze, Domus, or Texte zur Kunst, amongst others. Pinto is based in Berlin.

Since the advent of video art in the 1960s, museums and collections have been confronted with unprecedented challenges, both in terms of presentation and in terms of conserving and restoring time-based art. The challenges start at the level of media philosophy with the complexity of the concept of artwork. What do practical collection and conservation strategies look like today—in particular with a view to future technical developments? How can accompanying theoretical and practical methods be developed for the future? And how can museums, collections, and artists design past and future media art collections together?

The curator and author Kathrin Becker is Head of Video-Forum at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) in Berlin. In her curatorial practice she focuses on the role of contemporary art in society and on issues of exclusion/inclusion in contemporary cultures.

The art critic and curator Karen Archey is based in New York and Amsterdam. Currently she is Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

The artist Keren Cytter creates films, video installations, and drawings that represent social realities through experimental modes of storytelling.

Moderated by Anna-Catharina Gebbers, curator at the Nationalgalerie in Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art – Berlin.

Which new narratives are being created in the artistic engagement with and by way of media? What types of speculative scenarios can we develop in order to examine the effects of the impending ecological and technological future in relation to our anthropocentric present? And how can a discursive field be created in which the future anticipates the present?

Frederic Neyrat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UW-Madison (USA). He is the editor of Alienocene and a member of the editorial board of the journals Lignes and Multitudes. His most recent book is The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (2018).

Liam Young is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is co-founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and unknown fields.

Moderated by Esther Leslie, Professor in Political Aesthetics and co-director at the Birkbeck college, University of London.