Borders and boundaries: An anthology of Portuguese contemporary video art & experimental cinema.
Curated by Paulo Botelho Menezes (Oblíqua / Videoarte & Cinema Experimental)
From 2nd August to 14th September 2016
VisualcontainerTV is proud to present the first Portuguese videoart selection curated by Paulo Botelho Menezes independent videoart curator and director of Oblìqua Festival – only on Exhibitcontainer format – the place of the best contemporary videoart screening from all over the world.
Statement:
Experimental cinema, video art, computed generated audiovisual… Where does one start and the other finish, particularly now that it’s through digital mechanisms that most works are produced, regardless of its genre or type? Film was mostly screened, rarely looped, while video art was mostly installed. These days, both are screened or looped, side by side: the walls that used to divide them collapsed by their own as they both have more pertinent issues to mind. What do they have in common so strongly that it’s so easy to mistake them by twins, even if each one was born decades apart from the other and, for decades, exhibited separately? We now find them in the same room and sharing the same traits: subject unpredictability; meaning, visual and emotional depth; a continuous search to achieve something in particular without resorting to pre-existing formulas. And so this statement finds itself thinking on how art may allow itself to demolish its own borders and frontiers and, instead, to try to put back some beauty and humanity into a world now divided by too many false barriers. In August 2016, we don’t necessarily find sheltered ground where to stand that easily any more, one in which we can look directly at something without false borders and frontiers obstructing the view, the obstacles that mankind has created and grown so used to lately. Erase, rewind, start over… As in Luigi Nono’s homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, “No hay caminos, hay que caminar”.
Video Selection:
Marta Alvim – ‘A chegada’ (2013) / ‘The other side (prelude)’ (2012)
Sandro Aguilar – ‘Remains’ (2002)
Eduardo Brito – ‘Linha’ (2013) / ‘Outra Variação Veneziana’ (2014)
Anabela Costa – ‘In Motion’ (2016)
Tânia Dinis – ‘Linha’ (2016) /’Os teus olhos’ (2015)
Rita Macedo – ‘Implausible things’ (excerto) (2014)
Catarina Picciochi – ‘Memento 01/02’ (2014)
João Salaviza – ‘Strokkur’ (2011)
About Paulo Botelho Menezes:
Born in Portugal in 1976, he became interested in arts in childhood, which led him to develop a close tie with cinema and, later on, to photography, music and writing. In 2002 he founded the experimental music label Plancton Music; enrolled in film studies in 2003 and later, in 2004, a growing dissatisfaction with the constraints of narrative cinema led to a shift of focus to experimental cinema and video art, areas he began studying and working on by creating pieces exploring different approaches and techniques, part of which were integrated on several international collective exhibitions presented all around the world. More recently, he’s been exploring conceptual and formal aspects of video and film through the creation of feature length pieces of experimental narrative, documentary and video art pieces, as well as programming experimental moving image exhibitions through Oblíqua / Videoarte & Cinema Experimental.
About Oblíqua / Videoarte & Cinema Experimental:
Oblíqua is an anual experimental moving image exhibition that takes place in Lisbon in which several countries are invited to present, along with Portugal, programs representative of different cultures and formal/conceptual approaches so that, through international collaborations, both contemporary video art and experimental cinema are presented in an unifying, yet heterogeneous, body of work that aims to divulge a genre of experimental moving image that, by nature, tends to fragmentary registers and closed circuits, proposing instead to create common ground for international and transcultural dialogue.
http://obliqua.pt/