Die Geburt der Faust showcases a choreographic sequence in which an open palm transforms into a clenched fist in five distinct stages. What unfolds in the in-between offers a poetic space for broad perception and interpretation.

If we extend both forearms in front of us and bring the little finger together with the thumb, we can observe how the so-called "Holland muscle" emerges at the surface of one or both wrists—a tendon that was useful to our ancestors for walking on four limbs. Today, it serves as a remnant of evolutionary history in our bodies. The fist, however, symbolizes resistance.

In her work, Römmelt connects the symbol of evolutionary history with that of social and political rebellion. She brings the human capacity for resistance and the question of what we fight for into focus. The flash of the camera highlights the role of photography and film as chosen media in social resistance movements. The camera plays a central role in the choreography of this work. This raises the question: Who are we in this scenario? Are we the glaring spotlight of a police car targeting a nighttime assembly? Are we the journalist documenting the events? Or perhaps a researcher in a lab, precisely recording every movement of the body?
Although the aesthetics are reminiscent of Römmelt's earlier works, the photo-film, released in November 2024 and now shown for the first time, signals the beginning of a new creative phase.

Special thanks go to Mahmuda Ali, Nefeli Avgeris, Sara Koller, Marouane Lahmidi, and Fynn Römmelt, who significantly contributed to the creation of the photo-film work and the eponymous exhibition Die Geburt der Faust at videokunst.ch.

A transformative force between reality and imagination – it breaks the physical boundary of the tangible, creating spaces that lie beyond what is possible, weaving the visible with the invisible. The technology itself becomes an artistic medium that reimagines reality – a play of light, form, and movement that crafts artificial worlds.

VFX (Visual Effects) are digital techniques used in film, television, and art to create realistic or fantastical scenes that would be difficult or impossible to achieve physically. In video art, surrealistic or abstract effects are often used to create new aesthetic experiences and to question the medium of film in innovative ways.

Angela Ketterer is an FX TD graduate from Lost Boys | School of VFX in Vancouver, showcasing her digital creations including fire, water and destruction, alongside fellow graduates. She aims to highlight the creative and technical possibilities of using the software Houdini for visual effects.

Angela Ketterer selected the works being showcased in this programme.

With works by: Alex Anderson, Gregory (Grishka) Barboy, Chase Brewer, Joanne Chan, Lincoln Dupree, Jordan Gamache, Scott Hill, Jing Huang, Angela Ketterer, Judy Li, Andrew Penchuk, Michane Ricketts, Xuan Shen, Keeton Sims, Johan Tovar, Robert Veira & Masahiro Yasumatsu

In a field of tension between past and future, old and new are dancing together: By blending traditional motifs with modern technology, fascinating contrasts emerge that blur the boundaries between worlds. The dialogue between past and present invites viewers to lose themselves in this tension.

We revive the Bernese Dance of Death by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484-1530) – the work is presented as a video piece and an online virtual reality installation. Angela Ketterer's virtual reality interpretation is combined with the contemporary video work 'Invisible' by Peter Aerschmann. Additionally, the animation 'Danse macabre' by Jan Lässig is integrated as a complementary element into the exhibition.

Additionally, we build a bridge to the installation 'Totentanz?' by vatter&vatter which is located in front of the French Church in Bern (October 21 to November 8, 2024). This installation not only presents the Dance of Death by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch at its original location but also features a contemporary interpretation by Jared Muralt and Balts Nill. For more information, visit: www.bernertotentanz.ch

To see 'Auferstehung des Berner Totentanzes von Niklaus Manuel Deutsch' as a 3D model click HERE!

In "Staging #3", Sibel Kocakaya uses aluminium wire mesh to construct an avant-garde architectural structure that evokes the aesthetics of futuristic design. Through the interplay of light and shadow, Kocakaya imbues the mesh with a dynamic vitality, as it reflects and refracts an array of colours, casting a mesmerizing aura throughout the space.

The movement of the mesh, delicately choreographed by subtle air currents, creates an illusion of fluidity and motion. Complementing this visual spectacle is the digitally composed sound, crafted from ambient noises of the environment. The resulting audiovisual symphony transports the viewer into an otherworldly realm, where the boundaries of space and time dissolve.

From Pluto to Uranus to Neptune – an artistic journey through the trans-saturnian universe: TRANSSATURNIA invites you to immerse yourself in dynamic visual worlds and blur the boundaries between reality and imagination.

The video trilogy TRANSSATURNIA emerged in 2004 as an alternative to a printed catalogue that was intended to accompany an exhibition of drawings. Focusing on the diversity of artistic expression under the aspect of astrological archetypes, the drawings appeared in the video presentation within various moving environments.

Nine of the original twelve parts have since been discarded, leaving behind the three sequences that refer to the symbolism of the trans-saturnian planets Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune, respectively, as well as the zodiac signs Scorpio, Aquarius and Pisces. Accordingly, the drawings appear in different stagings: emotional and tense, cool and complex or lyrical and open.

Thursday, April 25, 2024 | 6:30 PM | Royal Baden

Anouk Sebald x @goodnighteliot
Video and Live Sound Performance

6:30 PM – Vernissage: Exogenic / Anouk Sebald
Screening Videowall Royal Baden
The video work Exogenic can be seen on the video wall at Royal Baden until May 25, 2024.

7:30 PM: Video and Live Sound Performance
Anouk Sebald x @goodnighteliot
The live sound performance by @goodnighteliot is part of the vernissage for the video work Exogenic by multimedia artist Anouk Sebald. In the performance, @goodnighteliot responds musically with live sounds to videos by the artist (Production: Louise Martig).

From 8:30 PM: DJ Set @goodnighteliot

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Exogenic is an abstract video composition that utilizes a mixture of symbolism and surrealist imagery to address our relationship with the seductive worlds of luxury that fill our social media feeds.

The eternal promise of a beautiful life, triggered in the video by the ambiguous symbol of the diamond or the flower, influences our perception of ourselves and others, as well as the way we construct our identities in relation to personalized advertising and socially mediated consumption.

The symbols of luxury, consumption, and perception addressed in Exogenic can be beautifully contextualized within the former cinema, now the Cultural House Royal. This creates an engagement with the space that challenges a dialogue between observation and observers.

FUTURE // NOW – KOLLEKTIV BETON (Nathalie Kamber & Rebekka Friedli)

A point in nothingness. FUTURE // NOW manifests in the form of hints, a reflective interplay of colours where much remains hidden. For a brief moment, the video allows a glimpse into a rapidly changing sequence of images, where a blending of meaning and triviality, randomness and intention takes place. Where does the gaze turn? Towards what the future offers in possibilities, into fragmentary memories of past life segments, into the emerging present? In this constellation of fleeting snapshots, a loose entirety forms. To interpret from it a structure or meaningfulness – if such is even demanded – lies with the viewers.

For FUTURE // NOW, KOLLEKTIV BETON used video material from their shared pool. The three-minute loop was created with modern control technology from Superposition. Thomas Baumann produced the music and sound design.

*watch in fullscreen for sound*
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LAST // LUST is a collaborative audiovisual work by Nona Krach and Jonas Albrecht. Starting from the fragments of Jonas Albrecht's single LUST, they developed an intertwining with both the music and the image creating a life of their own. LAST // LUST honours the edges of physical exhaustion. It is a play with the diffuse contours of the individual and the dependencies that a collective body entails.
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LAST // LUST will be screened twice daily in the videokunst.ch showroom at PROGR – Wed-Fri at 3pm and 5pm and Sat at 1pm and 3pm. Between the presentations of the full work, excerpts from it are played in a loop. In the video windows at Bienzgut in Bümpliz, as well as in the Houdini Cinema/Bar in Zurich, excerpts from LAST // LUST are also shown in a loop.

Norient Festival 2024 explores global connectivity and the collective experience of artistic and creative work. For artists, communities are central as they offer a safe space for sharing personal experiences and artistic practices, as well as an exchange at eye level – a principle that also shapes the collaboration of the international curatorial team – for this edition under the artistic direction of the Kenya based musician, DJ and activist Emma Mbeke Nzioka. The Norient Festival 2024 attempts to create new spaces of encounter and bring together artistic practices, experiences, and reflections that manifest themselves in sound and image.

We are pleased to show the works Terra Mater: Mother Land and Wall Piano as part of the videokunst.ch programme.

Can we approach non-human beings through digital space, engage in a dialogue and establish an empathetic connection? This question is addressed by Franziska Lauber in her work "A Little Gesture":

Inspired by a found video in which a coal tit lands on a girl's hand to take the offered seeds, Franziska Lauber explores human-nature relationships. The girl's hand is replaced by the artist's hand which is no longer in the same digital space as the coal tit. In a loop, the coal tit repeatedly returns to the hand without actually taking the sunflower seeds offered. The illusion of a shared encounter in the same physical and digital space only occurs when the bird seems to land on the artist's finger. The sentences presented as continuous text are in the form of a monologue, representing projections and expectations regarding non-human beings.

The scenery glows in an artificial idyll. Too green, too empty, too quiet, too untouched. Accompanied by spherical, slightly threatening sounds, the scene changes insidiously. Poster after poster, hotel after hotel towards a dying, disintegrating landscape.

Michael Spahr created "Human Nature$" for the Industrietempel Video Art Festival 2022 in Ludwigshafen (DE). The work won second prize in the competition on the theme of "Consumerism". The video collage deals with the topics of nature, climate and tourism. Photos of hotels, billboards and bird protection stickers are brought to life. A mountainscape in the Bernese Oberland becomes a Polynesian volcanic desert - a metamorphosis caused by longing and greed.

Frantiček's video work radically stages the deconstruction of the subject. Using a high-speed camera developed for military purposes that produces more than 5,000 images per second, he has recorded close-ups of human faces, that let their lips bubble and vibrate as the air flows through their closed mouths. The images are accompanied by a similarly irritating soundtrack of distorted snippets of speech. By breaking down fleeting movements into their minimal components, rendered in extreme slow motion that is also reminiscent of scientific-analytical research methods, Klossner creates monstrously distorted video portraits. The face as the facade of the subject that creates meaning and identity seemingly escapes control, individual features liquify and become illegible: the communication structure in which facial expressions and the speech apparatus are placed as a matter of fact collapses. This is where the unbroken obscenity of the close-ups comes in, carried by the immediate physical effect of the opening and closing mouths. Text: Karin Mundt, Hartware Medienkunst Verein Dortmund, 2004

The first presentation of "Mess Up Your Mind" took place in form of a 9-channel video installation at Kunsthaus Grenchen in Frantiček's solo exhibition of the same name (2001). Later versions of the work exist as a single-channel video (2003) and as a video sculpture with mirror teleidoscope (2018). Both versions are part of the Carola and Günther Ketterer Ertle Collection.

The high-speed recordings were made in cooperation with the Swiss Army's specialist department for weapon systems and ammunition, Camera: Fritz Trösch, Piranha infantry vehicle: Georg Stirnimann, collaboration: Peter Schuler, Daniel Schafer, Soundtrack: Ben Fay & Frantiček Klossner, Voices: Gwendolyn Masin, Ben Fay, Frantiček Klossner. Numerous friends of the artist took part in the production in form of a happening. Among them were the legendary Bernese mayor Alexander Tschäppät and his partner Christine Szakacs, the philosopher Gerhard Johann Lischka, the curator Sandra Gianfreda, the psychiatrist Aude Einstein, the art mediator Brigitte Morgenthaler, the architect Boa Baumann, the violinist Gwendolyn Masin, the musician Ben Fay, the artist Andrea Loux, the architectural historian Oliver Martin, the photographer and musician Reto Andreoli, the gallerist Bernhard Bischoff, the motion detectors Thierry Pulver and David Wernz, the curator Dolores Denaro, the architecture critic Daniel Walser, the photographer Ruben Wyttenbach, the digital transformer Benno Burkhardt as well as Sacha Erard, Marc Graf, Corinne Roll, Cédric and Manuel Scheidegger, Stefan Schwärzler, Martin Schweizer and Roman P. Schwitter.

Fluctuating between appearance and disappearance, the bits of information are suspended in time, turning in a loop, and fixing themselves in our minds. Far from linear time, the invisible traces of our own traumas resurface and imprint themselves onto the ever morphing skin like ghostly scars of a past violence.

‘ifeltitonce’ reflects on the notion of perpetual mutation, or rather the constant oscillation between different states of being. Through the prism of its virtuality, the work attempts to address the condition of instability, the fracturing of realities through time, transcending the human condition in search of the unattainable ‘true’ self. In its essence, ‘ifeltitonce’ questions the other, the non human, and thus also its own identity.

“Of course I’m against it, too” – In 1975, the artist’s grandfather has been stating his opinion on the women’s right to vote on Swiss national tv. That footage has only been found by the artist in 2021, 14 years after his death.

In her work “Dear grandfather (grandfather’s face)” Olivia Abächerli explores the question on how to deal with contradictory feelings towards beloved family members with whom one dissents fundamentally about basic political matters, worldviews and urgencies. This piece is an investigation on such tensions: the video works with and through the tv show’s footage. Like traces of a letter or a “map of thought”, writings and drawings are directly being marked on the grandfather’s face, onto the surface of the very moment of his painful statements. The image is being repeated and zoomed in excessively attempting to achieve opacity and proximity, an understanding that might never be obtained. Thus, the question processually shifts from ‹How to relate?> towards:

The three-part video installation "Arrival" by Bodo Korsig immerses the viewer in a calm but also slightly threatening visual world. Spherical underwater sounds and spoken poetry contribute to the work's eerie mood.

Bodo Korsig contrasts two sceneries that are not so very different from each other. Smoking chimneys framing underwater worlds in which plastic bottles squirm like a slumbering monster. "Arrival" shows the contrast between the beauty of our planet and how it is increasingly being destroyed by human intervention. There are vast amounts of plastic floating in every square kilometre of water, marine animals survive in a polluted space.
So do us humans - the veil of fog is becoming more and more present, especially in big cities and conurbations.

The artist criticises the lack of will to disengage from the affluent society and addresses the skewed distribution of money that is driving us further into a negative spiral.
"Reversing the current trends in armament policy would free up resources to concretely tackle the real global problems (such as environmental policy, pandemics, climate change, poverty, etc.)," says Bodo Korsig himself.

«Picture Yourself» zeigt eine wilde Collage von Aufnahmen aus dem Atelier des Künstlers. Die schnelle Bildfolge wird von türkisfarbenen Farbflächen überlagert, die immer genau einen Drittel der Bildfläche einnehmen – mal als störende Überschneidung, mal als bildergänzendes Element. Die Videoarbeit wird von einer Version des Songs «Rock’n’Roll Suicide» von David Bowie begleitet. Samuel Blaser, ebenfalls Künstler und Musiker aus Bern, hat dafür ein Playback erstellt, der Gesang stammt von Dominik Stauch. Das Lied «Rock’n’Roll Suicide» schliesst das Album «The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars» von 1972 ab und David Bowie wird darin zur Kunstfigur Ziggy Stardust. Der Song beschreibt das Scheitern des tragischen Helden und Stauch verbindet die Figur des Ziggy Stardust mit Richard Wagners Siegfried aus dem Ring der Nibelungen. Rock’n’Roll als Element der Avantgarde beschäftigt Dominik Stauch seit Beginn seiner künstlerischen Tätigkeit. «Picture Yourself» darf daher als Hommage an alle zu früh verstorben Künstler:innen verstanden werden. Ziggy Stardust oder Siegfried – die Geschichten weisen diverse Parallelen auf – verschmelzen zum fiktiven Platzhalter eigener Projektionen, irgendwo zwischen historischen Persönlichkeiten wie Vincent van Gogh, James Dean, Anne Frank, Tupac Shakur, Sylvia Plath oder Janis Joplin – um nur einige zu nennen.

Wir freuen uns ausserordentlich, im Rahmen des Berner Galerien Wochenendes 2023 die Videoarbeit «Nomads In Remembering» von Jennifer Merlyn Scherler aus dem Jahr 2020 zu präsentieren.



In «Nomads In Remembering» führt Jennifer Merlyn Scherler uns in die Vergangenheit und verwebt geträumte, erzählte und gelernte Erinnerungen zu einer poetischen Annäherung an die eigene Geschichte. Scherlers Grossmutter floh während des Zweiten Weltkriegs aus Polen in die Schweiz. Beim ersten Aufenthalt in Polen hat Scherler Film- und Tonaufnahmen angefertigt, die als Grundlage für die Arbeit dienten. Der von Scherler gesprochene Text beschreibt im ersten Teil geträumte und assoziierte Erinnerungen und wendet sich im zweiten Teil direkt an die geflüchtete Grossmutter. «Nomads In Remembering» verbleibt aber nicht im biographischen, sondern eröffnet eine Diskussion über intergenerationale Traumata und unseren Umgang mit Erinnerung. Die Vertreibung fand während des Zweiten Weltkriegs statt und es gibt zunehmend weniger Zeitzeug:innen dieser Ereignisse. Gleichsam werden durch die momentanen kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen laufend Familien auseinandergerissen, Menschen traumatisiert und neue Probleme und Spannungen gewaltsam erschaffen, die willentlich oder unwillentlich weitergegeben werden und somit kommende Generationen prägen. Jennifer Merlyn Scherlers Blick zurück resultiert deshalb nicht in einem historisierenden, sondern einem hochaktuellen und zukunftsweisenden Kunstwerk.

Olga Titus arbeitet multimedial mit Bildern, Videoanimationen, Installationen und Objekten. Besonders ihre monumentalen Arbeiten aus bedruckten Pailletten erhielten internationale Anerkennung. Diese innovative Methode der Bildgestaltung verbindet Olga Titus seit 2006 mit experimentellen und eigenständigen Videokunstwerken. So führt uns die Künstlerin in «fountain of existence» durch eine visuelle Meditation über die Entstehung von Identität und Heimat. Dynamische, kaleidoskopartige Farbabstraktionen wechseln sich mit einer monochromen Landschaft ab. Die Landschaftaufnahmen entstanden im Vulkankomplex Ijen in Ostjava, Indonesien, und wurden von der Künstlerin durch auftauchende Pflanzen, Muster, Lebewesen und Kunstobjekte belebt. Während die hypnotischen Farbstimmungen unsere Augen herausfordern, erlaubt uns die ruhige Landschaft, umrahmt vom beruhigenden Ton einer Klangschale, über die poetische, textuelle Annäherung der Künstlerin an die Begriffe Heimat und Identität nachzudenken.

Olga Titus arbeitet multimedial mit Bildern, Videoanimationen, Installationen und Objekten. Besonders ihre monumentalen Arbeiten aus bedruckten Pailletten erhielten internationale Anerkennung. Diese innovative Methode der Bildgestaltung verbindet Olga Titus seit 2006 mit experimentellen und eigenständigen Videokunstwerken. So führt uns die Künstlerin in «fountain of existence» durch eine visuelle Meditation über die Entstehung von Identität und Heimat. Dynamische, kaleidoskopartige Farbabstraktionen wechseln sich mit einer monochromen Landschaft ab. Die Landschaftaufnahmen entstanden im Vulkankomplex Ijen in Ostjava, Indonesien, und wurden von der Künstlerin durch auftauchende Pflanzen, Muster, Lebewesen und Kunstobjekte belebt. Während die hypnotischen Farbstimmungen unsere Augen herausfordern, erlaubt uns die ruhige Landschaft, umrahmt vom beruhigenden Ton einer Klangschale, über die poetische, textuelle Annäherung der Künstlerin an die Begriffe Heimat und Identität nachzudenken.

Das dreiteilige Werk entstand während eines dreijährigen Aufenthalts des Künstlers in den USA und wurde von der Stadt Minneapolis mit einem Preis ausgezeichnet. Die erste Episode zeigt die schwindelerregende Perspektive eines Deckenventilator-Flügels, die zweite Episode die untergehende Titanic in Form eines Bügeleisens. In der dritten und längsten Episode lässt der Künstler einen Cupcake – ein Convenience-Nahrungsmittel – langsam in seinem Toaster schmelzen, verkohlen und schliesslich in Flammen aufgehen. Bernhard Huwiler schrieb dazu im Jahr der Entstehung: «In der hier präsentierten Arbeit, Little Debbie’s Cupcake, dokumentiere ich die Veränderungen von Farben und Formen unter dem Einfluss von Hitze. Der Cupcake wird eine Skulptur im Übergang. Diese Transformation, anfänglich nur subtil wahrnehmbar, endet in einem Drama.» Auch die beiden anderen Episoden enden im Unglück – mit einem Sturz der Kamera ins Nichts. Huwiler belebt die uns alltäglich umgebende Welt durch neue Perspektiven und ungewöhnliche Kontextualisierungen und vermag so, die banalsten Objekte in Kunst zu verwandeln.

Die Auszeichnungen gehen an: Jannik Giger und Demian Wohler in der Kategorie Videokunst, Antonio Ramón Luque und Malte Homfeldt in der Kategorie Klimawandel und Zilla Leutenegger in der Kategorie Projektförderung.
Die Preisverleihung im Kino Rex findet in Anwesenheit der Künstler:innen statt. Eintritt frei, Platzkarten erforderlich.

Programm ab 18.30 Uhr - Begrüssung und Präsentation SEHNERV Shortlist 2022 Kategorie Videokunst

19.30 Uhr - Laudationes und Präsentation der prämierten Werke und Projekte

Blind Audition, das verhüllte Probespiel, ist ein vielfach faszinierendes Phänomen in Hinblick auf
das Zusammen- und Auseinanderspiel von Auge und Ohr. Dieses Setting benutzt der Film für eine
Achterbahnfahrt in die Untiefen des Unterbewusstseins Unbarmherzig nah wird die Protagonistin
durch die ewiggleichen Warteräume, labyrinthische Korridore und getäferte Vorspielzimmer
verfolgt. Es entsteht ein Sog des Transitorischen, des Liminalen, ein fortwährender Übergang
zwischen Versuch, Scheitern und Erfolg. Eine (Alb)traumhafte Spirale, in deren Zentrum der
instrumentalisierte Körper steht.

The multi-part video and exhibition project «Liquid Connections» by Lena Maria Thüring deals with the connections and relationships between the human body and the element water. videokunst.ch is pleased to present the fourth and final iteration of «Liquid Connections».

A dense, poetic text collage, a science fiction siren song about salt, sex, deep time, life cycles and cross-species thinking forms the center of the video. Scientific resources, fictional literature, and pop cultural references flow seamlessly together as a sprechgesang. «Liquid Connections» creates an underwater world activated by performers Zainab Lascandri and Lucia Gugerli through amorphous costumes, spoken word and dance. In their recital, the rise of sea levels due to global warming becomes a speculative vision of a return to the water and negotiates the possibility of human transformation towards a «multi species» that can better face the challenges of the future.

Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine has shaken the world to the core. Transgressions of national borders no longer thought possible, antiquated notions of empires and horrific breaches of international law trigger rearmament campaigns around the world and the peaceful, diplomatic way is struggling to bring a quick end to the conflict. At this threshold in history, videokunst.ch is honored to present three artworks in memory of the suffering, displaced, injured and murdered people of this war.



Lena Sigrist (*2001), «косити косарку», 2020, 3:09 min.

«косити косарку» is Ukrainian and means «mow the mower. The title refers to an old Ukrainian folk song, chanted by Ukrainian women to the sound of scythes while working in the fields. The song evokes feelings of severity, melancholy and suffering. Singing a folk song is associated with a sense of community and nation-building - narratives that shape and inform Ukraine. While the song has always been sung collectively, the artist Lena Sigrist generates a choir with herself. She created the video performance during the first Covid lockdown in March 2020. After the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, the artwork triggers new associations and emotions. The artist says: «I can't understand what it means to flee from war. The emotions and experiences stand in strong contrast with me and my situation. But I try to understand." (Lena Sigrist)



Maksym Khodak (*2001), «Flags of Propaganda», 2018, 3:00 min.

Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, first shown in 1925, is one of the best-known films in history. However, in its essence, it was Bolshevik propaganda. One day Joseph Goebbels said: «This is a great film. From a cinematic point of view, it is unsurpassed. Anyone who is uncertain in his convictions, after his review, may have become a Bolshevik. This once again proves that the masterpiece can be successfully established in a certain trend. Even the worst ideas can be propagated by artistic means.» The climax of the film, which confirms the previous thesis, is the raising of a red flag over the deck of the battleship. However, capturing such a frame was difficult due to the limitations of black and white cinema. That is why Sergei Eisenstein decides to shoot a white flag. Next, for the premiere show, he paints each frame of the film, which depicted the flag, in red. In «Flags of Propaganda», the Ukrainian artist Maksym Khodak repeats the gesture of the director and paints the flag as well, the only difference is that instead of the color of the Bolshevik flag, he used the colors of the most influential ideologies, which dominate the struggles of the modern Ukrainian society. (Maksym Khodak)



Mykola Ridnyi (*1985), «Seacoast», 2008, 1:00 min.

The video work «Seacoast» by the Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi was filmed on a coast of the Black sea and shows a static horizon dotted with the figures of fishermen. The picture’s calm surface is periodically punctured by scenes of jellyfish splattering on the ground. The main association is the sound of bombs dropping, achieved with recordings of frequencies produced by a jet plane. The video conveys the unsteadiness and relativity of calmness – how quickly and easily military aggression in the modern world can escalate. This work was made in response to the conflict between Georgia, Abkhazia and Russia that took place 6 years before the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. (Mykola Ridnyi)



Exhibition in collaboration with Videocity. The Videocity team currently organizes several exhibitions of Ukrainian artists in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. videokunst.ch fully supports Videocity's fundraising campaign to pay as many fees as possible to Ukrainien artists. As a thank you, Copa & Sordes designed a new edition: https://www.videocity.org/donate-for-ukraine

Der Kurzfilm «Looking for Alaska» des Kunstkollektivs Boyband CHIC thematisiert Strategien der Sinnkonstruktion. Drei fiktive Protagonist:innen beschreiben darin ihren Alltag und spekulieren über die Sinnhaftigkeit ihres Daseins. Mal neutral, mal energiegeladen, mal tiefgründig oder eher banal geben Sie Einblick in ihre Denkweise und beschreiben ihr Streben nach persönlichen Glücksmomenten. «Looking for Alaska» verbindet hierfür dokumentarische Methoden der Authentizitätsproduktion mit fiktionalen Erzählmechanismen des Spielfilms. Der auf verschiedenen, improvisierten Performances der Boyband CHIC basierende Kurzfilm wurde am 1. April 2022 im Kino Rex uraufgeführt.

Save the date:
Freitag, 1. April 2022, 18.30-20 Uhr - Vorpremiere des Kurzfilms «Looking for Alaska» von Boyband CHIC und Screening der Videoarbeit «Formfleisch» des Berner Kollektivs BiglerWeibel im Kino Rex Bern.
Ergänzt werden die Filme mit je einem Künstler:innen-Gespräch moderiert von der Kuratorin Marlene Wenger.
Kino Rex, Schwanengasse 9, 3011 Bern, Eintritt CHF 5.-

Der Kurzfilm «Looking for Alaska» des Kunstkollektivs Boyband CHIC thematisiert Strategien der Sinnkonstruktion. Drei fiktive Protagonist:innen beschreiben darin ihren Alltag und spekulieren über die Sinnhaftigkeit ihres Daseins. Mal neutral, mal energiegeladen, mal tiefgründig oder eher banal geben Sie Einblick in ihre Denkweise und beschreiben ihr Streben nach persönlichen Glücksmomenten. «Looking for Alaska» verbindet hierfür dokumentarische Methoden der Authentizitätsproduktion mit fiktionalen Erzählmechanismen des Spielfilms. Der auf verschiedenen, improvisierten Performances der Boyband CHIC basierende Kurzfilm wird im Kino Rex uraufgeführt.

Die Video-Collage Formfleisch von BiglerWeibel zeigt eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Blick auf den eigenen Körper sowie einen Blick auf die Welt aus den Körpern der Künstlerinnen. Ausgangslage ist die Aufarbeitung persönlicher Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen bezüglich prägender Rollenbilder, Schönheitsideale und Normen in unserer Gesellschaft.

The digitally generated videos in Stephan Bruelhart's series of works EMPHATICVANDALISM are full of associations. The viewer's gaze is directed to a scenic image in the center through a circling camera shot that seems to represent the key moment of an absurd narrative. The clashing figures are wrest from various contexts, some clearly decipherable, others seem obscure. The work The last dance... for example, shows a polar bear in close embrace with a pink figure drifting on an ice floe. The endangered polar bear dances its last dance with death; the climate crisis is poetically illustrated with the image motif of the Danse Macabre. In Teach him to fish... three unfortunate creatures in a run aground boat are being circled by fish hovering in the air like vultures. A scene that seems dreamlike opens up a field of association between the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean and a very concrete final image from Fellini's El la nave va.

Bruelhart nourishes his stories from current news as well as from his vast knowledge of film, theater and art history, which he incorporates into his works in a multi-layered way. The empathic vandalism he engages in relates to homage and satire by mixing disparate image sources. Bruelhart often creates his art directly in the virtual reality landscape. From there, some motifs move back onto the physical canvas or become animated video. The boundaries between the media as well as between analog and digital are fluid. The works are deliberately without sound, so that viewers could choose the soundtrack themselves. Depending on personal taste, these stories work to a jazz standard, a rock ballad, or experimental minimal techno.

The multi-part video and exhibition project «Liquid Connections» by Lena Maria Thüring deals with the connections and relationships between the human body and the element water. videokunst.ch is pleased to present the fourth and final iteration of «Liquid Connections».

A dense, poetic text collage, a science fiction siren song about salt, sex, deep time, life cycles and cross-species thinking forms the center of the video. Scientific resources, fictional literature, and pop cultural references flow seamlessly together as a sprechgesang. «Liquid Connections» creates an underwater world activated by performers Zainab Lascandri and Lucia Gugerli through amorphous costumes, spoken word and dance. In their recital, the rise of sea levels due to global warming becomes a speculative vision of a return to the water and negotiates the possibility of human transformation towards a «multi species» that can better face the challenges of the future.

Als Kooperationspartner des SEHNERV Medienkunstpreises 2020 freuen wir uns, die sechs Werke der Shortlist im Rahmen unseres Programms des zweiten Halbjahres 2021 zu präsentieren.
1. Steven Schoch, «Enjoy #2», 2018, 5:44 Min. /
2. Martina Morger, «Lèche Vitrines», 2020, 16:48 Min. /
3. Ruth Baettig, «Painting #9 (Persona)», 2020, 5:31 Min. /
4. Doris Schmid, «ströme II», 2018, 5:48 Min. /
5. Dominik Stauch, «2020, Five Short Stories», 2020, 12:00 Min. /
6. Sara Stäuble, «Nachtmeerfahrt», 2018, 12:19 Min.

In sechs Minuten wird eine Lawine an lustvollen, spielerischen, experimentellen und gefährlichen Performances losgetreten, die beim Zuschauen in Staunen versetzen. Vier Akteure starten vor laufender Kamera an einem verschneiten und trüben Wintertag in der Schweiz einen Prozess der energischen, gewalttätigen und chaotischen, aber in jedem Fall kreativen Zerstörung. Für die filmisch dokumentierte Materialschlacht werden alle Nutzgegenstände und Objekte des bürgerlichen Wohnhauses benutzt, verwandelt, zerdeppert oder verschüttet. Das Leitmotiv der Kettenreaktion sind allerhand Flüssigkeiten, von Schnee und Eis, Wasser und Bier über Tomatensauce bis hin zu undefinierbaren Chemikalien. Das Team zelebriert seinen Aggressionstrieb in Form einer eigendynamischen Serie von riskanten Experimenten mit dem Güterbestand eines Haushaltes. Sinn und Unsinn, Verbot oder Vernunft spielen keine Rolle. Die Kunst zeigt sich in völliger Enthemmtheit und befreit von gesellschaftlichen, akademischen, geschmacklichen Zwängen. Selbst das Putzen und Aufräumen mündet in totaler Verschmutzung.

Augustin Rebetez wurde für das Werk «Liquid Panic» mit dem SEHNERV Medienkunstpreis 2020 ausgezeichnet. Als Kooperationspartnerin des Vereins SEHNERV freuen wir uns, dieses Werk präsentieren zu dürfen.

Augustin Rebetez wird für sein Werk «Liquid Panic» mit dem SEHNERV Medienkunstpreis 2020 ausgezeichnet. Die Preisverleihung im Kino Rex findet in Anwesenheit des Künstlers statt. Eintritt frei, Platzkarten erforderlich.
Programm ab 18.00 Uhr - Begrüssung, Präsentation SEHNERV Shortlist 2020 //
19.00 Uhr - Präsentation Preisträgervideo "Liquid Panic" von Augustin Rebetez mit Laudatio und Preisvergabe

In the midst of the Engadine mountains, the artist duo LULU & WHISKEY embark on a tactile journey of exploration. Dressed in silver suits, the two protagonists move in time with plants, animals, fungi, and microbes. They use their bodies and minds to measure present-day reality, for example, by stroking along the ridge of the Munt de la Bescha piece by piece. Between boulder fields and witches' hills, LULU & WHISKEY talk to mushrooms about their ancestors, walk in the forests of their intertwined brains, and observe how their ever-changing bodies manifest themselves anew. Finger-like eyes - also the namesakes of the video installation - trace sensory transitions and intervening connections.
«Fingery Eyes» captures how treading new spheres alters perception and understanding of life's connections. Four video loops provide a glimpse into the mountain research laboratory where internalized experience and appropriation of the high alpine environment merge.

The two videos by Anouk Sebald, produced on an iPhone, focus on the central theme of perception and thus question concepts such as observation and comfort.
Originally conceived as a ceiling video, «Superposition» is a play of colors and forms at the same time but eludes immediate attribution. We would like to thank Georg Hensler for the permanent loan of the video «Superposition».
«Eutopia» combines floral imagery and a meditative soundscape into a place of ideal well-being with merging and overlapping image layers.

Last year, many things were different and almost the entire news was dominated by the Corona pandemic. Other explosive topics were pushed into the background as a result, but have by no means lost any of their relevance. The refugee crisis at the gates of Europe affects hundreds of thousands. As comprehensive as we are informed about the number of infections or people who have already been vaccinated, we learn very little about the people who live in wretched refugee camps under catastrophic conditions at the external borders of Europe and in North Africa.

The documentary video «Intervista Riace» by Costantino Ciervo, which was produced in 2012 in the Calabrian town of Riace, offers a bright spot in dealing with this misery. The small community of 2100 souls has repeatedly attracted international and media attention in recent years with its revolutionary refugee and integration policies. Ciervo's interview with Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace and founder of the «Città Futura» project, is about a progressive social and cultural commitment that is second to none. In the interview we learn how the settlement of so-called "irregular immigrants" (boat people) from various developing and crisis countries of the global south came about to revitalize Riace, a southern Italian settlement affected by emigration and decay.

// What can be seen in your video? //
Three storylines running side-by-side show me in seemingly everyday office situations: with an open laptop on the table, reading a text with a concentrated expression, standing in front of the desk. Only on closer inspection does it become clear that other forces are at work here, that the floor shown is actually a wall, and that the person supposedly sitting or standing is instead acting from the floor in a lying position.

// All too familiar scenes in the current lockdown, in which numerous employees are forced into the isolation of the home office. So is this about Corona-art dealing with the constraints and crushing burden of lockdown in the pandemic? //
No, the video was made back in 2014. It's about forces that affect us without us being able to influence them directly. Climate change, migration, digitalization, they are simply there as a condition. When we read a book, we consciously expose ourselves to linguistic forces. Next to the sex drive, gravity is perhaps the most effective and enigmatic, unconditional force. Gravity cannot be eliminated. But one can deal with it, apparently annul it. I use gravity in the video as an artistic visual strategy to explore possibilities of invalidating forces.

// What does this mean and how does it become apparent in relation to the current situation? //
I call such forces "affectless", because they act on us without passion. This is the general core of the video, which can be interpreted as a symbol of our slapstick way of dealing with the virus and the restrictions imposed on us. Like Buster Keaton, we perform the most ornamental contortions with a serious face.//

// Is this how the video relates to the title? //
Yes. The title refers to the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde who explained economy as the science of passionate interests. The video attempts reflecting his thesis into an anti-economy—while reading Tarde.

The video «Credits» shows exhibition-shots taken in the different museums of Genova IT. A text, similar to credits on the end of a movie is considering roles of a hypothetic viewer, but also of the exhibit, the collection. There is a correlation between the seen and the one that sees. Since the concept of public museums arose with the birth of the nation-state, the exhibition was thought of by the artist as a tool to "create" culture, the citizen can identify with. As much this is a construction, it is a challenge to find new ways to deal with collections we inherit, to reconsider such.

Unfortunately, the showroom at PROGR will only be open on Friday, January 15, 2021 from 2-6pm and on Saturday, January 16, 2021 from 12-4pm. However, the video can be viewed daily 10am - 10pm in our video window in Bienzgut/Bümpliz through the showroom window for the entire duration of the exhibition until February 20, 2021.

Die Ausstellung kann bequem durch das Schaufenster von Aussen betrachtet werden. Wir freuen uns über Ihren Besuch!
Adresse: PZM-Weltenfenster, Gerechtigkeitsgasse 72, 3011 Bern (Bus Nr. 12 / Rathaus)

«Peripheries of bodies» is a consequential animation film which casts the medium of film back on its origin, the image. Beginning with divers on a platform in the sea, the viewer is simultaneously immersed in pictorial spaces in pictorial worlds, whose associative inner logic collides with the customs of conventional narration. Topics such as encounter, separation, the dissolution of boundaries and the radius of what can be physically experienced are examined for their echoes in the semiotic echo chamber and the possible vocabulary of the mental stage space of the earlier works is substantially supplemented.

Accompanied by gentle, poetic sounds, fragments of childhood memories pass by in the video work «dream» from 2017. A plant gracefully bending in the wind, the roaring of the sea on the beach, circling birds on the horizon - from black and white to bright colours. Images and sounds that symbolize for Gördes her strong longing for freedom. A longing whose first signs she recognized in some early childhood dreams.

In «passers» from 2012, shadows of passers-by hurry across the pavement to strangely jumping sounds. The camera's viewing angle cannot be assigned and works against the normal view of the viewer.

It is small tricks and magic, colours, sounds, words or sentences through which Beate Gördes alienates, shifts and transcends her familiar, urban environment. The foreign merges with the familiar or every day. One is always somewhere and nowhere, restless and quiet at the same time. Beate Gördes lets us travel in a playful, surreal way through space and time, somewhere above or below the surface of things.

Beate Gördes (*1961 in Herten (NRW), DE) studied fine art and painting in Cologne from 1987-1992. Since 1985 she has regularly been represented in exhibitions and with participations both in Germany and abroad and has participated in numerous international short film festivals. Beate Görde's artistic work is multi-layered and interdisciplinary. Since 2006 the medium film/video and sound has complemented her artistic work. In recent years, her main focus of work has developed into video compositions in combination with electro-acoustic sounds. She is the founder and curator of the event series BLAUE STUNDE, which presents video screenings by video artists at various locations. Beate Gördes lives and works in Cologne.

We are no longer in the place where our body is. We are constantly on digital or medial journeys, everywhere present, and yet nowhere really present. With smartphones and tablets we are always connected, sending selfies out into the Internet and receiving messages and information from all over the world. We are in different places at the same time and still miss many things, including ourselves. The video installation I MISS YOU deals with this contradiction that the individual is exposed to in the face of the profusion of places and activities in the virtual offer of the 21st century.

The video work «Creative Estonia» by Flo Kasearu deals with the production mechanisms of the creative industries. To this end, the artist has set up a conveyor belt for art production in the basement of her eponymous house museum «Flo Kasearu's House Museum». The video shows how, step by step, exquisite and richly decorated objects of art are produced by hand from simple glass containers. The production of art takes place around the clock, so that thousands of beautiful objects are produced on the conveyor belt every day.
Founded in 2013 by Flo Kasearu and self-proclaimed «House Museum» is a site- and theme-specific exhibition of the artist's work in her house. Not only have many site-specific works been created here, but the contexts of private and public are constantly shifting, for example when the artist conducts guided tours in her own house. The setting of the video is also a living museum in which the artist lives, creates and stores her works and shows them to the public. «Creative Estonia» is also the name of a development centre that promotes and develops the creative industries and creative businesses in Estonia.

From above we see a woman's body stretched out lengthwise on the slab floor and covered with flour dust. It starts with the head moving, then the upper body slowly straightens up. The woman will gradually stand up and, in doing so remove the flour dust from her skin and leave the visual space. Only the traces of her body - the outlines of her previous silhouette drawn with flour - remain. White on black, they bear witness to Andrea Vogel's "Auferstäubung", refer to the ephemeral presence of the artist, blurring physicality and disembodiment.

The stop-motion and fading effects that Andrea Vogel used in her photographed performance "Auferstäubung" further reinforce this impression. The video, which consists of a sequence of single images strung together, was created in 2018 as part of the work-in-progress art project "Kunstversuchsanstalt #4 Universum", which was realized together with the artist Olivia Notaro (as part of the project series of the same name initiated by Olivia Notaro) in the former bakery Vogel in Oberdiessbach. Andrea Vogel's return to her parents' former bakery awakened in her the need to feel the flour on her own skin and led to an examination of her own origins. Andrea Vogel says, she was "born into the flour dust and returned as an artist forty-four years later".

Notice "Meet the artist": Artist Andrea Vogel will be on site at the showroom on Saturday, May 30, 2020 12-4 pm and is looking forward to your visit.

Please note our modified opening hours: Thu/Fri 2-6pm, Sat 12-4pm (Wed closed)

Since its formation in summer 2018 the Berne-based artists' collective around the semi-fictional Boyband CHIC has landed one pop smash hit after another. With texts in dialect and a large portion of (self-)irony, the three members of Bern's youngest boyband deal with popular cultural themes in their video performances, making hearts melt and, incidentally, reviving feelings and memories of the 1990s. In their latest video performance «Merci» - premiered in the videokunst.ch showroom - the three boyband members slip into the role of burglars who gain access to the Franz Gertsch Museum in Burgdorf. They interweave - musically and scenically - two different storylines, which refer to each other and for which the song text marks the starting point. The song, which shows a striking dichotomy, deals in a first, for the boyband CHIC untypically melancholic part with the difficulties that a multitude of young artists are confronted with within the art business and denounces the lack of appreciation. The second, overly euphoric part of the song propagates the seemingly derived solution and encourages the creation of art that pleases everyone. On a visual level reminiscent of the appearance of a Hollywood film, the staged museum break-in illustrates how the boy band CHIC finds its way into the noble halls of high culture.

Since its formation in summer 2018 the Berne-based artists' collective around the semi-fictional Boyband CHIC has landed one pop smash hit after another. With texts in dialect and a large portion of (self-)irony, the three members of Bern's youngest boyband deal with popular cultural themes in their video performances, making hearts melt and, incidentally, reviving feelings and memories of the 1990s. In their latest video performance «Merci» - premiered in the videokunst.ch showroom - the three boyband members slip into the role of burglars who gain access to the Franz Gertsch Museum in Burgdorf. They interweave - musically and scenically - two different storylines, which refer to each other and for which the song text marks the starting point. The song, which shows a striking dichotomy, deals in a first, for the boyband CHIC untypically melancholic part with the difficulties that a multitude of young artists are confronted with within the art business and denounces the lack of appreciation. The second, overly euphoric part of the song propagates the seemingly derived solution and encourages the creation of art that pleases everyone. On a visual level reminiscent of the appearance of a Hollywood film, the staged museum break-in illustrates how the boy band CHIC finds its way into the noble halls of high culture.

"Two Books" was created from the 3-dimensional work series also entitled "Two Books". Therefore two books with linen covers of different colour and size were placed on top of each other. This resulted in almost endless possibilities as well as an unlimited interplay between the most diverse books, their contents and their outwardly appearing painterly colorfulness. In the video, 400 photos from this work series are lined up in the shortest time intervals (1/10 second) and are underlaid with a sound-rhythm carpet corresponding to the speed, in collaboration with "Electronica Nu Jazz, London".

In Ursula Palla's video installation «great white», an assembled horde of snowmen and women, all formed from three snow globes and with a face made of three pebbles, are made to suffer their fate. They melt away as if they had been caught in the warm spring sun, losing their eyes, mouth and head and falling down; until the belly and torso of the snow figures slowly dissolve and only a puddle of water with pebbles remains of them.

Ursula Palla was able to carry out her long-planned concept with the first snow of winter 2017. The artist, who grew up in Chur, brought a carload full of snow from the Black Forest into her studio without hesitation. As soon as the snowmen and women were set up, they melted away. «great white» reveals the process of disintegration in real time and, with the partly speeded-up passages, embeds itself, intentionally or not, into the current global political debates around climate change, inspiring reflection.

With his video work «Cool clouds that look like they should be spelling something, but they don't» artist Stefan Karrer gives an insight into his PC desktop. In an endless loop, picture after picture, cloud after cloud after cloud opens up. Karrer found them during an online research when he searched for keywords like «cloud» and «wave» in connection with adjectives like «cool», «crazy» or «lonely». A monotonous, computer-generated female voice leads the viewer through the folders of this collection of images and keywords. She reads the comments with which the photos of clouds and wave formations were originally posted.

Karrer's desktop video reflects contemporary media use in a humorous and rhetorically clear way. It strikingly illustrates the pitfalls of online research, when the seemingly subjective moments in nature become uniform sensations through the constant descriptions and classifications of the images on the Internet. The fact that the shared images on the Internet do not correspond to the real moments is also made clear in the comments.

The video work «crystallization» by Olga Titus is a cinematic collage that combines frame by frame from fragments of perception and memory into a colorful and symbolic visual world. Underscored by the soft sounds of a carillon, fragmentary landscapes, rhythmically choreographed hands, enigmatic faces and masks are lined up to create an animated landscape of memories. It is an exotic world full of wonders and magic that moves across the screen as if moved by the wind, alluding to the transience of perception. The large, multicolored glittering crystal stands as an antithesis to this, uniting and crystallizing the moving images of memory.
He is also the starting point of the intuitively created work, which developed without a storyboard in a flowing working process. As a Swiss artist with Malay-Indian roots, Olga Titus's artistic work is strongly based on her own biography and deals in numerous works with her multicultural identity, self-perception and external perception.

Anlässlich des 100 Jahre Jubiläums der Eingemeindung von Bümpliz durch Bern zeigen wir als Spezialprogramm zum Jubiläumsfest im Videofenster Bienzgut die Videoarbeit «Remember Bümpliz...?!» von Michael Spahr. «Remember Bümpliz...?!» ist eine düstere Vision des Berner Stadtviertels Bümpliz in einer postapokalyptischen Welt – am 9. Januar 2119 – am 200. Jahrestag der Eingemeindung. Die überflutete und kurz darauf als trockene Matschwüste gezeigte Ansicht ruinierter Bümplizer Wahrzeichen ist eine surreale Verfremdung des Alltäglichen. Michael Spahr thematisiert somit nicht nur die befürchteten Gefahren der aktuellen Klimapolitik, sondern übersetzt und platziert diese in die Gegenwart unseres unmittelbaren Umfelds.

In Philip Ortellis «Doomsday Doughnut» a doughnut with reflecting glaze plays the leading role. Between a bird's eye view of a coastal area, people running towards the sunset on the beach, shots from the middle of a river and fire clouds burning in the distance, we encounter the floating Doughnut. On its surface, its surroundings are reflected which, without a clear pattern of action, depict the basic elements, air, earth, water and fire. Ortelli uses the shape of the doughnut as a metaphor - on the one hand, the unhealthy food stands as a symbol of the American affluent society and the excess of consumption that has spread all over the world and which we are gradually beginning to question. On the other hand, the form of the Doughnut also refers to Kate Raworth's theory of the «Doughnut Economy». The English economist takes the problem of the steady, exponential growth of hypercapitalism as a starting point for the development of her model. However, in her model, the doughnut is not a pastry with negative connotations, but rather a ring describing the safe and just living space of humanity between the basic supply in the inner world and the exploitation of the environment in the outer world of the ring. This «Ecological ceiling» was intended to limit the steady growth in favor of the exploitation of the ecosystem while at the same time securing the basis of human life. Whether the doughnut saves us from the end of the world (Doomsday) or accelerates it depends on the interpretation of the metaphor.

On the occasion of the exhibition «Ekstase» (Ecstasy) in the Zentrum Paul Klee, videokunst.ch presents three video works, which manifest ecstasy through movement. While dancing, energies are unleashed that liberate and trigger undreamt-of forces. Through her compulsive urge to move, the protagonist in Chantal Michel’s work from 1998 «...und ich will» (and I want) shifts in a trance-like state. Jeannette Ehlers’ voodoo dancer in «Black Magic At The White House» (2009) conjures up the powers of her enslaved ancestors through dance. The dancers in Tian Xiaoleis «Myth» (2018) escape reality with extravagant costumes and free dance. The three works demonstrate a spectrum of twenty years of international video creation and enable the viewer to trace the development of the medium.

For the work Weltruhe the artist Bodo Korsig merges the diciplines dance, poetry, music and video. A poem by Berlin based author Scardanelli (Thorsten Preisser) works as a backdrop for the videowork. Text and music are interpreted by the dancer Christin Braband in a contemporary choreography. Through the medium video the movements are rendered abstract and are turned upside down, which leads to the shadowy appearance of the dancing figure. In the orchestration of these different contributions, the gloomy atmosphere of the poem that is about the inspiring but dangerous environment of the mountains are portrayed.

Die Videoarbeit "Future Me" von Lena Maria Thüring erzählt semi-fiktionale Anekdoten aus den Biografien von jungen Erwachsenen. In den ineinandergreifenden Erzählfragmenten berichten sie von einschneidenden Erlebnissen aus ihrer Kindheit und spekulieren über die eigene Zukunft. Die persönlichen Schicksale sind geprägt von Migration, prekären Familienverhältnissen und Gewalt. Als Stimmen aus dem Off, sind die Geschichten jedoch nicht den einzelnen Personen zuzuordnen die im Video zu sehen sind. Die Bildebene ist geprägt von simpel choreografierten Kampf- und Tanzszenen der Jugendlichen in gleissendem Neonlicht, die Gesichter zum Teil maskiert oder stark geschminkt. Die Jugendlichen performen zum Rhythmus einer Trommel und wirken ernsthaft bis unbeteiligt. In einigen Momenten filmt die Kamera jedoch weiter, wenn sie aus ihrer Rolle fallen, anfangen zu lachen und einander zu triezen. Dieser Bruch wirkt als Gegengewicht zur Schwere der erzählten Geschichten und lässt die Betrachterin kurz aufatmen.

TEK, TO und NIK sind drei naturbelassenen, sechs bis elf Tonnen schwere Verrucano-Steine aus dem UNESCO-Welterbe Tektonikarena Sardona, das dieses Jahr sein 10-jähriges Bestehen feiert. TEK steht für Glarus, TO repräsentiert St.Gallen und NIK verkörpert Graubünden. Die drei Steine touren von Februar bis November 2018 durch die Schweiz und besuchen dabei mehrere andere UNESCO-Welterbestätten. Im März waren sie auf dem Waisenhausplatz in Bern platziert. Anfang November wurden die Steine wieder an ihre Fundorte zurückgebracht. Die filmische und fotografische Dokumentation dieser Reise wird in der Ausstellung STONES in der Galerie Bernhard Bischoff & Partner und bei videokunst.ch vom 29. November bis 22. Dezember 2018 ausgestellt.

In her video piece "Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits??" Elisa Giardina Papa investigates the impact of digitalization on basic human needs such as sleep. Gathering data about our bodies has become a central part of our lives through smartphone apps that map our diet, exercise and menstrual cycle. Within this culture of relentless self-optimization, even the surveillance of sleeping habits becomes a sport – relaxation is now a matter of training, bad habits must be kicked and new techniques acquired.

Giardina Papa visualizes this imperative of efficient relaxation using a visual language reminiscent of Instagram ads. Some of the scenes are shot from above, the image composition and the combination of pastel colours carefully selected to reference current graphic design trends. Between the perfectly staged surfaces, a female computer voice offstage supplies instructions and commands, making the animated female protagonist increasingly uneasy. The chatbot is barely capable of responding to human emotional states, and the automated lawn mower is just as insensitive in relation to the plant arrangements in the short clips.
Is this a sign of the precarious relationship between humans and intelligent machines?

«In the next sense of Dagmar and Doris» formally relates meticulously composed images of a women’s friendship. Dagmar and Doris, portrayed by the two artists Jasmin Bigler and Nicole Weibel, establish skillful powers of observation in relation to one another and to their surroundings. The pictorial forming bodies receive an abstract, almost sculptural impact without loosing the expression of friendly intimacy. Once registering themselves in the urban architecture, another time explicitly exposed, they record apparently unapparent details of urban space.

Following clear visual concepts, the individual scenes build a coherent succession of grey and pink, soft and hard materials within urban and nearly natural urban space. Individual elements such as hair or stockings and the soaking up and pressing out of water from sponges return again and again. Dagmar and Doris are unapologetic in their femininity and genuine in their gestures. The humorous and absurd lightness of the work only benefits more from this.

videokunst.ch is screening three performative video works by Franziska Bieri to open the fall semester 2018. In these three videos the artist misappropriates staple foods, increasing their symbolic value all the more. Eggs, milk and bread have always been the resources of agricultural civilization and carry powerful meaning in Christian iconography. The egg is the symbol of the beginning of life, milk is the original food of the mother for the child and bread is seen in the Catholic Mass as the true body of Christ. In „Bread on Earth” (Zopf auf Erde) the artist creates something new from these resources - braided yeast bread - however, unfit for human consumption. In the mixing of flour and milk upon the open field the original ingredients that emanate from them are returned to the earth. A service of the artist for nature?

The interventions are more destructive in the other two works. The trampling of the eggs visualizes the fragility of this potent symbol and at the same time questions the role of men within this constellation. The imposing, mountainous landscape of Engadin underlines these contrasts of fragility and strength, which we ascribe to the egg as a symbol. Likewise, the nailing down of the bread upon the kitchen table in „Drive“ (Einhämmern) has something violent, especially since the significance of the gesture is not revealed within the first moment. One interpretation is critique of the rigidity of reoccurring traditions, which are no longer useful to us.

In cooperation with AroundSpace gallery in Shanghai videokunst.ch is showing positions of Swiss videoart in China the exhibition Multiple Contexts.

The exhibition Multiple Contexts features four established video artists from Switzerland: Peter Aerschmann, Gabriela Löffel, Dominik Stauch and Juerg Neuenschwander. Recommended as the first group of exhibition artists by the non-profit video platform videokunst.ch (Bern, Switzerland), they are at the forefront of their fields of video art. The exhibition includes representative works that reflect their varied and unique styles. In Switzerland, cultural activities are not homogeneous. Rather, they incorporate multiple cultures and reflect the contexts of the country’s four major language regions. Video art has been thriving in Switzerland for the past 40 years. The four artists are participants in and witnesses to the evolution that is helping Swiss video art to develop outstanding depth, breadth, maturity and diversity.

The video work "A Packet of Salt" is part of the series "Assembly Line Projects", which the Chinese artist Li Xiaofei began in 2010. The videos were filmed in factories in Norway, Sweden, the USA, New Zealand and China and address the worldwide social changes caused by the assembly line - for the artist the ultimate symbol of capitalism.
A salt factory in China forms the setting for the documentary scenes in "A Packet of Salt". The historical, indeed almost romantic-seeming transportation of salt mountains upon small rafts stands in contrast to the problems addressed in the video of soil contamination through salt production. Salt always was regarded as a purifying remedy and was essential in preserving food. The question of what meaning the resource salt is assigned in today’s post-Fordism is delivered inherently within this work.

In cooperation with the AroundSpace Gallery in Shanghai.

"The world" is an early animation of the Chinese artist Tian Xiaolei. The black and white, abstractly moving forms veritably lure the viewer into an undertow of this foreign, yet peculiar, known world. The associative space is relatively clearly defined through the background noise: the underwater world with sounds of the sea develops into an environment of automated sequences of a machine, finally finding itself in the air, accompanied by a flock of birds, circling with the wind around imposing skyscrapers. The world sketches a picture of a civilizing development; from the portrayal of fauna and flora culminating into architectural and industrial mechanisms of humanity.

Small Paths precisely sketches a poetic portrait of its two protagonists through the specific omission of information. On the left we follow the explorations of an ant, which is repeatedly moving out of the camera’s depth of field. The focus on the ant’s habitat -extremely magnified for the human eye- makes us empathetic for it’s tragic destiny. To the right it is a moving camera, which feels it’s way along a woman’s body without showing her face. We accompany the woman as she walks through a garden with a pond and maybe we wonder what brought her here. Liao Wenfeng examines textures and surfaces with extreme precision. With an effective, almost ethnographic eye the subtle connecting of elements from both videos becomes apparent and the viewer is sensitized to the symbolic details.

Die Videoarbeit Protein Tracer gibt Einblick in die reiche Formensprache des Kollektivs U5. Die einzelnen Objekte und Oberflächen des Videos generieren sich aus den installativen Arbeiten. U5 arbeiten mit den unterschiedlichsten Materialen, vom 3D Scan über Wattestäbchen bis zu Plastikboxen von Proteinnahrung und fügen diese in raumgreifenden Ensembles zusammen. Protein Tracer funktioniert in diesem Sinne als Kondensator des kaleidoskopischen Werks von U5.

Die starken Charaktere Dieter Seibts manifestieren sich in Zeichnungen, Fotografien, skulpturalen Installationen ebenso wie auf Video. Seine Figuren sind Archetypen der Gewinner respektive der Verlierer im aktuellen Weltgeschehen denen er in seinen Werken eine Bühne gibt. Für die Videocollage «Zwischen den Zeiten Lieder Singen II» wurden einzelne Aufnahmen zusammengefügt und mit Kompositionen der Kapelle Clairmont unterlegt. Es ist ein Potpourri aus bewegten Stilleben von Seibts immer wiederkehrenden Protagonisten und Alltagsbeobachtungen, die in ihrer Trivialität eine ganz eigene Ästhetik erhalten. Die Collage ist somit Dokumentation und neue Werkform zugleich.

The «Bubble 1- Bubble 6» edition consists of excerpts from the film «NoNoseKnows», which Mika Rottenberg presented for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
The cinematographic video work of Rottenberg questions today’s post-Fordist production systems through humorous-ludicrous sceneries. Originally the soap bubbles are film sequences from the setting of a cultured pearl farm staged in China. The soap bubbles focus the attention to the «non-place» of the corridor and become poetic parentheses in the absurd daily routine of the factory. In the short sequences we see soap bubbles slowly floating, fantastically warping themselves and finally bursting. This happens within the backdrop of peculiar vestibules with numerous doors, whose colorful walls should hide the fact of the gloom of artificial lighting and frugal amenities.

«Inside My Head» is a systematically composed choreography of six different forms yielding and partly emerging one after the other. The analogy to theater is evident, since the individual forms display their own colors and their movement patterns like their own different characters, betake to their own «stage» and interact with one another and only to disappear again. Every form is assigned the sound sequence of a wooden xylophone. The interaction of the melody sets the rhythm of the movement. The clear structure is broken through the altered succession of the participants. New colors and forms are created in the overlap of the ellipses and allow for complex sequences of images to develop. In his video work Dominik Stauch understands the moving color fields as a reference to painting. The initially faint colors run together with other mixed colors, similar to the techniques of watercolor. The selection of color fell deliberately not on vibrant, pure color shades, but rather towards in between shades, - which however, give off a surprising effect in the combination.

Stauch sees these optical effects as an analogy to our everyday life, where new memories overlap with the old and add a new dimension to our experiences. We are compelled to constantly judge our experiences anew, based on cumulated, added experiences. Consequently, memory is never a succession, but rather a consecutive reevaluation of past experiences.

Text: Stefanie Marlene Wenger

Dettwiler alludes to the work’s place of origin with the title, specifically, the Potemkin Steps in Odessa. The stairs obtained their name through Sergei Eisenstein’s iconic 1925 silent film «Panzerkreuzer Potemkin». The film loosely orients itself on the chain of events that led to the onset of the Russian Revolution in 1905. The scene on the steps in which the mass of people streaming towards the port is brutally shot down by the czaristic army, would become one of the most famous and most cited moments in film. One of the reasons why this early work revolutionized film history at the time, is Eisenstein’s new form of editing, which no longer followed a narrative but rather set as it’s goal, the emotional claims of an audience. Dettwiler stages himself as a floating ghost in a gesture of condensed ease at this historically significant place, and creates herewith his own tribute to Eisenstein’s oeuvre.

The work Erfan’s Notebook arose through a personal acquaintance of the artist with Erfan, a young man from Afghanistan whom he met in the transit center for asylum-seekers in Zollikofen. Even more than the progression of his language skills, the notebook allows us an insight of Erfan’s personal history - his flight from Afghanistan through Turkey into Switzerland. Empty or torn out pages, a rudimentary sketch of Europe with names of countries, telephone numbers and email addresses, give witness to the daily life in a dangerous journey of an unknown outcome. Supposedly mundane language exercises in Erfans’s notebook such as “Can I see your passport?” and “Have a good trip“ suddenly obtain a whole different significance with this background knowledge. OKRA (Robert Aeberhard and Oli Kuster) added a soundtrack to Erfan’s Notebook. Erfan’s journey is musically reconstructed and made to come acoustically alive through piano and field recordings, static noises and lost harmonies.

Die Videoarbeit «mare mosso» gewährt einen Blick auf ein ruhiges Meeresufer, das in Bewegung gerät sobald die Projektionsfläche aus Papier von den Händen der Künstlerin traktiert wird. Ein Blatt nach dem anderen wird entlang der Uferlinie abgerissen, das zweidimensionale Videobild erweitert sich um die dritte Dimension des sich wölbenden Papiers. Die vom rechten Bildrand eintretende Protagonistin balanciert vorsichtig der Uferlinie und den Wellen des Papiers entlang während sich das leise Meeresrauschen mit dem Geräusch des Reissens vermengt. Ein Stimmungsbild entsteht, das sinnbildlich ist für das Leben, das sich oft als Gratwanderung zwischen den Elementen auf bewegtem Untergrund erweist.

Die verschiedenen Elemente der Videoarbeit «IT, HEAT, HIT» von Laure Prouvost korrelieren nur teilweise miteinander. Die schnelle Abfolge von Videobildern wird unterbrochen von Text-ausschnitten und bedrohlichen Geräuschen, während die Stimme der Künstlerin aus dem Off einen weiteren Erzählstrang hinzufügt. Alle Informationen aufzunehmen ist unmöglich, die Reizüberflutung somit Teil der Rezeption. Das Stilelement der direkten Ansprache zielt auf die physische Präsenz der Betrachterin und bildet, da eine Narration nur schwer zu finden und schnell wieder verloren ist, die einzige Konstante, die durch die 6 Teile des Videos führt.
«IT, HEAT, HIT» kann als Metapher auf die Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie gelesen werden, auf die Verführung der Medien und unseren Versuch, uns im konstanten Überflutung aus Informationen zu navigieren.

The subject women in a garden in the lacquer painting «Vuon Xuân Trung Nam Bac» by Nguyen Gia Trí, serves as starting point for Dong's work «Sweet Noel». Identity can be adapted and changed by history, it is always in transformation. It may be that Nguyen Gia Tri was inspired by Monet's paintings, also Monet was inspired by Japanese prints with the subject woman in the garden. Male actors are playing women's roles in japanese Kabuki. The body becomes form. Dong is creating a body language that overdraws the idea of a vietnamese and asian looking woman with references from the asian mass- and pop-culture. Eleven women hold static poses for seven minutes. Like in a Music Video, the women are waiting, standing, sitting, lying in the garden filled with colorful plastic flowers. The women remain in their positions and wait for their turn in the love song «Hai Mua Noel».

«Zen for Internet» is a contemporary interpretation of «Zen for Film» (1962-64) by Nam June Paik. Using the iconography of the internet and computer, the work features an endlessly rotating «loading wheel» on a white background. Typically, the «loading wheel» would be a temporary, in-between state before seeing the fully loaded image. «Zen for Internet», however, indefinitely freezes the in-between-ness; the viewers never see the desired image. The artists conceived of this work existing in multiple iterations in a variety of media: as a website (www.zen-net.org), a endless looped video, a painting, or as various types of merchandise including prints, t-shirts, and a tod bag. «Zen for Internet» speaks to the inherent changeability of the concept. Rather than existing in a single instantiation, this work can exist in a variety of formats, just as «Zen for Film» existed in an assortment of contexts, all of which were still «authentically» the work.

The video «Monday» belongs to the cycle of works entitled «sieben Tage/seven days» by Renata Bünter. In order to emphasize everyday routines, the Bernese artist named the work according to the days of the week. «Monday» seduces the viewer into the personal childhood memories of the artist, influenced by the rural surroundings of Central Switzerland and a catholic extended family. The shooting locations, the settings and the props have been faithfully taken over in part. Rita Siegfried painted the view from the window in «Monday»: a dreamlike room illusion emerges - a moment of disassociation. The moving pictures in a lucid artistic language allow the viewer to immerse in a poetic and surreal world.

«Walking with Richard» has his source by an engagement over several years with the major oeuvre of Richard Wagner «Der Ring des Nibelungen». It’s a combination of performative and graphical videos of Stauch. The artist condenses the opulence of the opera in a sort of seven subject based video clips. The whole work is made by Dominik Stauch himself and this aspect of an overall work of art is what interested him in the opera of Richard Wagner as model. There are autobiographical elements blended with literature, or aspect of art and cultural history brought into the present time. The work captivates the spectator by an accurate interplay between image and audio. The dynamic of the geometrical shapes, the colours and the sound turns into an optic and audio experience. The work ties up on the tradition of the experimental movies of the avant-garde of the 1920 years, the abstract respectively the concrete art, but shows also influences of the minimal and the pop art. The contemplative rhythm and the time coupled with poesy and irony create ample association spaces which blow up for own imaginations. (Text: Bernhard Bischoff)

«Clima(c)tic Changes» is a dreamlike video collage from the Bernese artist Michael Spahr, a.k.a. VJ Rhaps. The socio-critical video is based upon photographs of Swiss mountains that slowly change; even the surroundings of the mountain ranges transform themselves, creating a new climate, in turn influencing the alpine world. Time and again short climaxes occur. The progressing climate change and the impact of the constant concrete smothering of the alpine regions are confirmed. «Clima(c)tic Changes» is a vision of the global climate changes, addressing the unsettling, gridlocked perceptions of the alpine myth.

For the Happening «Breaking Bread» Munich artist Janine Mackenroth blew up 194 old, inedible loaves of bread arranged as a global map (194 countries of the world). The overall duration of the explosion lasted barely 10 minutes. This corresponds, on the average, to an explosion every 3 seconds – the same period of time in which people are dying globally as a result of hunger. Furthermore, Janine Mackenroth is consciously playing with another daily taboo: the destruction of food.

Every encounter begins with a greeting. One welcomes with a handshake, with a hug, a gesture...Greetings are a generalized standardization; they are polite rituals that help us to come into contact with others and strengthen our relationships. The video « The Greeting » (orig: « El Saludo ») from Adela Picón shows these moments of greeting. The encounters are entirely different: sometimes formal, sometimes euphoric. Yet, every time the encounter ends up the same: in the moment of greeting, the one person blends into the other until only the white screen is left to see. «The Greeting» was created for an exhibition in the historical museum Sant Feliu de Guixols (Spain) in collaboration with the people of the city. Adela Picón is interested in the dealings with the different. She plays with notions such as tradition, past, public and private sphere, social integration or the careless usage of rules and allocation.

The video «Mountain and Concrete» (orig.: «Berg und Beton») deals with the Albigna Dam in Bergell, a transit valley between St. Moritz and Italy. The historical - political events and personal histories have been translated into performative video images, questioning the fascination of the dam and the controversy of this gigantic, structural intrusion in the Bergell Valley. The video moves within the tension between architecture and nature, between give and take, between survival and existence, between mountain and concrete, between body and work, between past, present and future. The dam is acoustically explored as a body of sound parallel to the development of film sequences. Only the combination of image and sound allows the viewer to feel and understand the spatial and temporal dimensions of this imposing structure. In 2014 the video «Berg und Beton» was nominated for the Bernese Film Prize.

Die Videoarbeit «Current Status» ist eine quasi-dokumentarische Arbeit, in welcher der partielle Kontrollverlust der Sprache thematisiert wird: Ein junger Mann, der unter einer starken neurologischen Fehlfunktion, dem Tourette-Syndrom, leidet, liest die 30 Artikel der «Allgemeinen Erklärung der Menschenrechte». Durch das ständige Zerhacken des Textes und das unkontrollierte Einschieben von Fluchwörtern – ein typisches Symptom für Tourette – wird auf das defizitäre und kaum eingelöste Versprechen der Menschenrechte hingewiesen. Die Arbeit zeigt hier eine eindeutig politische Komponente. Die Art des Vorlesens repräsentiert den «Current Status» der «Declaration of Human Rights ». Zum anderen nimmt die Arbeit eine Methode der «Arts Incohérents» auf, einer kurzlebigen Kunstbewegung, die Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts in Paris entstand: Hierbei werden bestehende Texte oder Lieder expressiv ausgelotet, indem sie von Personen mit neurologischen Fehlfunktionen wiedergegeben werden.
Istvan Balogh spielt auf subtile Weise mit der Inszenierung, um genau diese in Frage zu stellen. Entlang der Grenze von Kontrolle und Kontrollverlust lässt Balogh neue Bedeutungen entstehen.

The animation «Global Vulva» connects female figures and vulva symbols from different times, countries and cultures, while they morph into each other - the cultural meaning of the female genital becomes visible again. You'll see paleolithic engravings, the Greek goddess Baubo, a winged woman from an ice-age culture in Siberia, an Irish Sheila-na-gig, drawings of vulvas and of their symbols, the Indian goddess Kali and a Yoni stone, the Tibetan goddess Naljorma Dewa, a statue of a noble ancestor of the lwena in Angola, the Aztec goddess Mayahuel, the Black Stone at the Kaaba in Mecca, a double-tailed mermaid from a church in Tuscany, the protecting Dilukai from Micronesia, hands forming the mudra « Lotus and Bee » in a labyrinth, an amulet of the Egyptian goddess Hathor, a winged sun disk, and the oldest human figure ever found, the so called Venus of Hohle Fels. Thyes’s work revolves steadily around social and cultural symbols, their meanings and their transformations. With the pictorial work on symbols she would like to enhance our imagination, open new perspectives and encourage interaction.

The Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers deals with slavery and colonialism repeatedly in her work. In the video « Black Bullets » she uses the Haitian Revolution as her theme.
In 1804 the French colony of Saint-Domingue fought for their independence. The slave revolt, which preceded the revolution, is the only successful slave revolt in history. It began with the legendary Vodou ceremony at Bois Caïman (Crocodile Forest) in the northern part of Saint-Domingue. According to legend, a black pig materialized and was sacrificed in a ritual in which hundreds of slaves drank the pig’s blood. The blood gave these slaves the power to fight for their freedom. The result is the world’s first black republic: Haiti. With her video « Black Bullets », Jeannette Ehlers reminds us of the history of slavery and pays tribute to the revolution. The video was filmed in the Citadel Laferrière in Haiti.

In the video «Black Magic at the White House», Ehlers is performing a voodoo dance in Marienborg which has a strong connection to the triangular trade. It was built as a summer residence for the Commander Olfert Fischer in 1744, who since sold it to merchant Peter Windt, who also had created a great deal of wealth from the slave and sugar trade, and who even brought slaves with to his home in Denmark. Several others of the period’s trading men have owned and put their stamp on Marienborg, and today it still plays an important role in Denmark, in terms of its position as the official residence of the country’s prime minister. The video is part of the large project ATLANTIC. Jeannette Ehlers, with ATLANTIC, brings focus on a dark chapter in Danish history: its intensive participation in the slave trade and colonialism. Through digitally manipulated photographs she puts in a poetic way reflections on the Danish slave trade.

In February 2012, Pia Maria Martin worked as the first residency.ch artist in the live-in studio at the PROGR_Center for cultural production. The water in the basins of the fountains in the city of Berne formed huge icebergs at 14° C. Inspired by these ice landscapes, she tried to reconstruct them in a freezer in the cellar of the PROGR. In a number of freezing processes, Pia Maria Martin created her own film sets with balloons, condoms and surgical gloves filled with water. By employing a separate switch, the camera (a 16mm Bolex fitted with a motor) allowed her to capture slow motion exposures. She not only found the meditative aspect alluring, but the experiment of allowing time to work for her as well.

In his digital collage PIMPOLIS he „pimps-up“ Bumpliz (medieval spelling: Pimpenymgis/Bimplitz) creating a pulsing city (greek: Polis). Michael Spahr constructs a (sub) urban dreamworld from hundreds of photographs, all of which were shot in Berne-West. A habitation emerges, vanishes and morphs itself. The (sub) urban village becomes an unexpected urban metropolis. Fascinating metamorphoses occur within the surreal animation, touching thereby on such urban themes as „gentrification“, „migration/ multiculturalism“ or „urban sprawling“.