07 Apr 2008

Call for entries: Volgograd International video festival Forward»2018

Volgograd International video festival Forward»2018
Invites artists and curators to participate

Volgograd International Video Festival Forward»2018 announces the start of accepting works and invites artists and curators to participate. Festival will take place in Volgograd in May-June 2008 and it is planned that it will have the usual cinema hall format as well as online format in the Internet. It will allow presenting the festival programme not only to local, but also world wide audience. Works of multiple genres can participate: from short-length films and video art to animated cartoons and documentaries.
It will be the Civil Jury that will evaluate the works, and it will involve specialists of different culture areas, but also, what is no less important – Citizens of Volgograd, recognizing their personal responsibility for social and cultural situation in the city. Besides, a Prize of Audience’s Sympathy will be awarded.

Manifest
Volgograd is an extraordinary city. Extraordinary and sophisticated – in many ways. It emerged from ruins in times of the Golden Horde in “no man’s land” between Europe and Asia (initially the fortress stood on an island amid mighty Volga, which was a boundary river then). Three times the city changed its name (and made it into history under sinister name of Stalin – it is here, in Stalingrad, where the decisive battle of the Second World War took place). It changed its appearance – from wooden fort to redbrick merchant town, from a pile of burnt bricks of war times to Empire style haughty polis. It incurved along the Volga bank – a pulsating vein of Russia, with a dot-and-dashed line (or rather unread Morse code message, where dots are plants and dashes – residential areas). Here everything is intermittent and pulsating. Vertical lines of sky scrapers under construction (and the main vertical – Mother Russia monument, the highest in the world), interlace with low blocks of residential houses; local transport-miracle – express tramway – dives underground, and then again comes on surface to broad daylight; a street rumble of a million-people-city changes to patriarchal silence of old patios… Everything is dashed and pulsating.
So is the city’s cultural life. For the past few years Volgograd got acquainted with modern art on an international level again. Again – because before post-perestroika still air period international avant-garde art festivals already rioted here, the first of them being not in Russia even, but still in USSR. And again a new generation of modern artists appeared in the city – video-artists included. Not spouted from the old perestroika generation – but rather, jumped out of void, out of a pause in total Volgograd pulse.
It’s exactly for this new, unknown generation (and by its forces) that this festival is being prepared. As a launching point, as a territory for a dialogue with equal young video-makers from all around the world…
This festival is for the young in the first place. The number 2018 in the name of the festival is not a misprint, since today we invite to show their debut creative work those people who in 10 years time, in 2018, will become a formed core of modern art, We want to look forward together with You, forward into next decade. We want to show ourselves – to the city and to the world. We are not afraid of putting ourselves into world cultural context – even if the comparison would not be in our favour – and we invite young artists to come forward together with us. We invite the senior to show us their excellence. We want to learn, want to find our own place in modern culture. And perhaps, and why not – to lay foundation of a new local cultural tradition, which would not be intermitted.

Planned programmes
Forward– competitive programme for young artists (under 33 years of age).
REview – Competitive programme for artists above 33 years of age. Each artist can submit TWO works, one of which represents the opening stage of his creative work, and the other – today’s stage.

DEADLINE
For works sent by snail-mail – 20th of April 2008.
For works sent by FTP – 1st of May 2008.

Festival’s organizers
“Art-incubator �?Videology’ workshop with support from Volgograd regional NGO �?Centre for cultural initiatives development’ “InTerra”.

Contact information
Address: 400131, Russia, Volgograd, Prospekt Lenina, 21, GUK Volgograd Museum of Graphic Arts

mail: forward[a]interra34.ru

www.forward.interra34.ru/english.htm