Folkwang Museum

Captured while Vanishing

05 Jun - 22 Aug 2010

Video art in Museum Folkwang

From 5/6 to 1/8/2010 the Museum Folkwang is showing two exhibitions on contemporary video art. These are the first presentations in the exhibition rooms in the basement of the listed old building, renovated thanks to the support of the Folkwang Museumsverein and the Wolff-Gruppe.

The selection of works for the exhibition Captured while Vanishing looks back to the beginning of video art in the Folkwang Collection. Under the supervision of the Director of the day, Paul Vogt, a video studio was set up in the Museum Folkwang where young artists could produce videos directly. From the 1970’s video exhibitions and festivals took place regularly. The Museum Folkwang is taking up this tradition again. Apart from the two exhibitions, regular, thematic screenings entitled Video Folkwang will present recent video productions.

In the exhibition a number of works will be shown that were produced in the Folkwang video studio such as Ulrike Rosenbach’s Frauenkultur-Kontaktversuch from 1977. For the first time since 1981, Marcel Odenbach’s installation 100 Intellektuelle beten einen Öltank, also made in that period, is on show. Apart from classics of video art (Nam June Paik, Klaus von Bruch and Jean-Francois Guiton), new acquisitions from today’s artists such as Darren Almond, Deimantas Narkeviĉius, Kimsooja, Michal Rovner, Jana Sterbak und guests such as Romeo Grünfelder, Erik Lanz oder Patrick Borchers are on display. The poetic title refers to the various facets of the medium, whose images are temporary and fleeting. The moments of “vanishing” is both metaphor and leitmotif of video work.

Since 2009 the Museum Folkwang’s video collection has been systematically process and academically studied, digitalized and restored. In includes nearly 300 U-matic cassettes and other formats. Digitalization of the collection is supported by funding from the State of North Rhine Westphalia. In the near future, a publication on the video collection is planned, as are further presentations of the collection.

A short guide to both exhibitions with texts by the curator Sabine Maria Schmidt is available at the cash desk in the foyer of the Museum Folkwang for 2 Euro.
 

Tags: Darren Almond, Kimsooja, Deimantas Narkevicius, Marcel Odenbach, Nam June Paik, Ulrike Rosenbach, Michal Rovner, Sabine Maria Schmidt, Jana Sterbak