Super Vario Birds

Brief history of the video artist and the history of the video

Cóndor

Today, analogue video is attractive primarily thanks to the distinctive aesthetic quality of its pixelated image and raster errors. But for Czech artists who first explored the possibilities offered by video art in the late 1980s, this medium represented a path towards freedom. Through a portrait of her grandfather Radek Pilař, one of the pioneers of Czech video art, the director explores her own legacy of imperative creative fascination. Her film’s main story, i.e., the process of reconstructing the 1989 exhibition Video Day, contrasts this enchantment with life in the final days of the totalitarian regime, which different sharply with the adventures of those who decided to emigrate – whom the filmmaker also visits in order to discover forgotten works, get to know their creators, and re-establish broken ties.

IDFA and Canadian filmmaker Peter Wintonick had a close relationship for decades. He was a hard worker and often far from home, visiting festivals around the world. In 2013, he died after a short illness. His daughter Mira was left behind with a whole lot of questions, and a box full of videotapes that Wintonick shot for his Utopia project. She resolved to investigate what sort of film he envisaged, and to complete it for him.

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

This is a didactic film in disguise. A progression of brilliant geometric shapes bombard the screen to the insistent beat of drums. The filmmaker programmed a computer to coordinate a highly complex operation involving an electronic beam of light, colour filters and a camera. This animation film, without words, is designed to expose the power of the cinematic medium, and to illustrate the abstract nature of time.

A kinetic prayer and structuralist intervention. Shot entirely on an iPhone 11 in a desolate Midwest laundromat, 108 spin documents the mechanics of impermanence. The film shifts from heavy turbulence to suspended repetition—not as a path to completion, but as a study of the loop itself. Featuring a layered soundscape, the work asks the viewer to stare into the rotation until the noise becomes a mantra.

Enigma is something of a more glamorous version of White Hole, with a wide variety of elaborate textures (often composed of iconographic and religious symbols) converging towards the centre of the screen.

Trinity Ens is a video art piece representing a personal view of the body soul and spirit trough experimental visuals.

Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.

In a city inhabited by drawn beings, an indigenous boy witnesses a holographic appearance. It is the arrival of an entity of unknown materiality. With a mysterious presence and exotic allegories, it starts to enchant the residents, awakening their most insane senses.

Ghouls, mutants, zombies, bloodsuckers, ghosts, freaks, vampires and demons are brought back from the dead and reanimated into ectoplasmic goop - it's Halloween, Trick or Treat.

An Eternalism film

Paysage Nocturne

This live show features the energetic analysis of television network news by Brian Winston. Winston looks at the news as a unique institution, governed by its own conventions and constraints.

How does the "cultured" gorilla, i.e. Koko, come to represent universal man? Author and cultural critic Donna Haraway untangles the web of meanings, tracing what gets to count as nature, for whom and when, and how much it costs to produce nature at a particular moment in history for a particular group of people.

Director Anthony Ramos joins his good friend, painter Frederick J. Brown, on a trip to Beijing for a retrospective of Brown’s work at the National Museum of China in Tiananmen Square in 1988, the first retrospective of an American artist in China.

A political work in which Ko Nakajima opposes himself to the Vietnam War.

A collaboration between Kadet Kuhne & Alba G. Corral.

Presented without commentary, this film reveals the thinking behind the work of John Baldessari over the course of his career, and provides clues to the understanding of the artist's paintings, photographic work and books.