13 May 2016

Announcement Videoex Festival 2016

The International Festival of Experimental Film & Video VIDEOEX, by now in its 18th edition, opens again at the end of this month. From 24 until 29 May 2016 VIDEOEX will be showing 100 works at the intersection of film and art.

The programme on the Guest City Beirut: Si vous pensez avoir compris, c'est qu'on vous a mal expliqué offers a multifaceted insight into a place that has at once been idealised as the Paris of the Middle East and feared as a powder keg of violence. Lebanese film art carries the burden of representing both a failed nation and a failed confrontation with on-going political conflict. Besides showing the works of established names such as Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari and Mona Hatoum, VIDEOEX will be presenting works by a younger generation of artists and filmmakers such as Danielle Arbid, Marwa Arsanios or Lamia Joreige.

The Swiss Competition features outstanding works by some of the country's current video and film artists. Out of the 80 submissions from all regions of Switzerland the best works will be selected and presented to the audience.

The programme section CH-Focus shows the latest works by Zurich artist Ursula Biemann, as well as a selection of her earlier films on migration. The shown ensemble of her work documents global, economic and geopolitical developments and their devastating consequences on the environment, individuals and communities.

The programme section Specials features five film makers who are poles apart in much of their art: 89 year-old iconoclast and enfant terrible Kenneth Anger, the recently deceased radical artist, feminist and trailblazer Chantal Akerman, the new long feature film by the outstanding musician, poet and video artist Laurie Anderson, the 16mm short films and last long feature by the anarchic maverick Christoph Schlingensief as well as a selection of psychedelic wonderlands with the works of Tony Conrad.

The architecture special on Utopias looks at conceptual architectural dreams of defining space and their creation, success and failure in film as in the real world. Films such as Godard's Alphaville postulate new types of interactions between us and the world and redefine our relationship with our surroundings. Places of concretely realised utopias such as the derelict domed house of Michelangelo Antonioni's und Monica Vitti's shown in Volker Sattel's film La Cupola, or Fordlandia, the crumbling industrial concept town in the Amazonian rainforest featured in Melanie Smith's film, reveal how these conceptual dreams have failed. Detached from their intended functionality, the failed architecture shown in these works once more become a space for fictional and poetic projection.

Two audio-visual live acts offer a particular highlight towards the end of the festival. With Love and Revenge, the Lebanese duo Rayess Bek and La Mirza present a visual concert of electronic music and video montage combining Arabic evergreens with excerpts of the golden age of Egyptian cinema in real time. And with their collaboration Supercolor Palunar, the two French artists Jérôme Noetinger and Lionel Palun create a sensual firework out of the synergies of sound and image.