VIDEO:Video Art Miden-Screenings and Projects June 2020

Video Art Miden in recent months has turned its 13th Festival edition, initially scheduled to be held in Kalamata, into a monthly online meeting, presenting different selections of video art each month, starting in April. For June 2020 Video Art Miden presents 3 new video art programs that include 22 selected works by well-known and emerging artists from 14 countries.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Video Art Miden Archive

The online screenings aim to continue the communication between artists and the audience and to maintain an energetic international discourse through art, in the middle of a crisis which, while isolating us, it also unites us on an international level. The new programs are available online starting on June 1^st on Video Art Miden’s youtube channel.

Svetlana Ochkovskaya is currently studying MFA Fine Art at the Goldsmiths University of London, having graduated in BA Fine Art from the Southampton Solent University in 2017. She has been shortlisted for Batsford Prize Award 2019 and 2017 and for Visual Art Open Prize 2018. Aspex Gallery Portsmouth has nominated her to the shortlist for Platform Graduate Award 2017 and Best Visual Artist Guide Award Portsmouth 2019 and 2018. Ursula San Cristobal is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Barcelona. Her work proposes a meeting point between music, contemporary art and audiovisual language. She is devoted mainly to Live art and low tech video art, addressing issues such as gender violence, migration and subjectivity. ACCI BABA is a Japanese visual artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. His works explores the unseen perceptions deriving from physical and non-physical realm, combining the artistic expressions into installations and films. The dialog crossovers the context of natural phenomena and humanity’s consciousness, enhancing the viewer’s experience through the hyper-reality. Through the physical and temporal dimensions, the artist indicates a point-of-view that people has never seen before, and images that people don’t know how to react to, but make them think. Leila Ziu’s work is a discovery through participation and play. A practice based around the liminal space that invites us to surrender, that shakes us out of our habitual life; a space to release control, release judgement and dissolve the self. With one foot rooted on solid ground, the other in the air; the logical and illogical in partnership, in an attempt to escape the de-humanising forces of post-modern society. As soon as Dimitris Papadopoulos completed his studies at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Technical University of Athens, he knew that he would not deal with this subject again. His love of stories and image soon brought a camera in his hands. Since 2013 he has been experimenting with videography and since 2017 he has been a professional Filmmaker. Marina Piniatorou is a greek dance artist. Graduated from Greek National School of Dance in 2011, she has worked as a dancer with many choreographers from Greece and abroad. She has created three personal dance works forming her own dance Company ‘Release the Fly’, and has been a co-choreographer in two others. Since 2014, Release The Fly is cooperating with the film company sick my duck.sound&vision, and together they created many video art projects, video dance and experimental music videos, some of them selected and screened at International film and dance festivals. Socos is a well-known Greek guitarist and music composer. He is also creating video art and working as a video artist, mostly in the area of music video and dance performance. Socos alongside with the production company sick my duck.sound&vision, has created many music videos for Greek bands. In 2009 he created the experimental film “Mescaline” that has been released with the music album “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”. Allison Beda’s artistic practice delves into the personal, examines passion and obsession, often poetically exploring the intersection of cinema, dance and “narrative” (which is sometimes documentary), resulting in bold and unique films. Beda’s award winning work has screened internationally at festivals, in theaters, on television, in art galleries, on billboards, in the metro and even at the Olympic games. Her company “A Muse Productions” has a penchant for delightfully, deliriously flawed characters, and is particularly fond of telling funny stories about intelligent women, making inspired, though sometimes foolish choices. In his works, Shir Handelsman explores the relations between sound and visual images by using human encounters and situations, which become surreal and absurd. He creates damaged sound machines, visual disturbances, and manipulations on the image, in order to expose the disruptions that exist in intimate human relations. Ilaria Di Carlo is a visual artist working in the fields of filmmaking, scenography, and the performing arts. She graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Rome and holds a Master from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art in London. She subsequently studied Film at the SAE Institute of Berlin. Her filmography includes the short films The Black Book of L. and the award winning The Divine Way. Natalia Gonzalez Requena is a Bolivian artist currently residing in Pittsburgh, USA. Frequently, she returns to Bolivia where she also continues to make art through different forms of notation: drawings, script, sculpture, performance recordings, which I collect and reuse in the same way one would a toolbox. Her practice involves looking for ways to make visible the subtle dynamics that run at the edges of the field of vision, or otherwise disrupt the apparently fixed hierarchies of what is perceived, such as making the focal point become the background and vice versa. Neither dance nor theater, but not unlike these, her actions are more rehearsals and poetic occurrences. Oliver Poppert is an emerging video artist, working primarily in digital video and photography. His work focuses on concepts of time and space – abstract representations of spaces and people with a particular interest in urban environments and how they are inhabited. After a first autodidact artistic experience followed by studies in Art History and Contemporary Art and Photography, Pablo-Martin Cordoba structures his work around the notions of temporality and movement. Both the latent movement in the still image and the stillness constructed from motion define a homogeneous domain where the digital image becomes a plastic material. The expansion of the spatiotemporal domain is doubled of a medial questioning which implies a free exploration of digital technologies, its possibilities and its limits. In this context, and by means of photomontages, videos and installations, the artist proposes a particular vision of reality without excluding shifts towards fiction.

Program

Questioning on social distance: body – space – dance “Post Quarantine I”, curated by Maria Bourika, presents the works:

Svetlana Ochkovskaya, The Seen, 2019
Ursula San Cristobal, Desastres maravillosos, 2019
Leila Ziu, Music video for Pearson Sound’s ‘Earwig’
Dimitris Papadopoulos, Intershapes, 2019
Socos & Marina Piniatorou, Core. part III, 2019
Allison Beda, All about you, 2017
Dasha Lyubimova & Nikita Semykin, Frida Kahlo, 2019
Michael Mersereau, The Paradist: Sharp Shooter, 2019
Irena Paskali, Open dialog, 2018

“v-Dance ALWAYS” curated by Margarita Stavraki is a video-dance selection with high technical characteristics, where dance, rhythm and movement become either the object of research or the medium of narration.

Fran Orallo, Liquid room, 2019
Shon Kim, BOOKANIMA: Dance, 2018
Grigoris G. Gaitanaros, Face the Fact Co., 2019,
FuLE, MASS, 2019
Gaetano Maria Mastrocinque, back!, 2018
Sheila Garcia, Habitat, 2019

Ascending (or descending) while wandering around existential structures, poetic landscapes, intersections, paths and trajectories, intertwining space and time in an allegory of life “-Above” is curated by Olga & Gioula Papadopoulou.

Shir Handelsman, Recitative,2019
Ilaria Di Carlo, The Divine Way (La Via Divina), 2018
ACCI BABA, Exodus, 2017
Natalia Gonzalez Requena, Desplazamientos, 2014
Oliver Poppert, Cogs, 2019
Pablo-Martin Cordoba, Winter landscape, 2019

Info: Video Art Miden Youtube channel, Duration: 1-31/6/20, Days & Hours: 00:00-24:00, www.youtube.com