My Curated Compilations

The Video Art and Mass Incarceration compilation includes works from the Video Data Bank collection that focus on the rapid expansion of prisons during the end of the 20th Century in the United States. Since the time of slavery, the criminal justice system has been a continual source of racially-biased injustice and oppression, and the rise of mass incarceration serves as an expansion of those existing policies. The compilation showcases the ways that video artists in the 1990s used the medium as a means to understand the reality of prisons, and create a more equitable and collaborative dialogue between themselves and incarcerated people. Featuring the work of Lawrence Andrews, Harun Farocki, Annie Goldson & Chris Bratton, and Laurie Jo Reynolds, Video Art and Mass Incarceration connects touchstones of experimental video to the politics of the movement to defund policing and defend Black life.

The included works are further contextualized in the essay Video Art and Mass Incarceration by programmer Zach Vanes.

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CHANNELING is an entryway into the spirit realm and the queer body politic: a program of experimental moving image work that calls up the ghosts of the past and the specters of the future. The intent of the program is to re-imagine film and video as occult technologies that allow us to connect with the bodies, experiences, and emotions that are often invisible--ghostly even--in everyday life. The works in the program take a personal approach in dealing with the political and historical problems that haunt the queer experience: the AIDS pandemic (Renwick, Di Stefano), the body in transition (Montague), the idealized nuclear family (Peña, Robinson), and the narrow cultural standards of desirability (EMR, Moulton). CHANNELING presents emerging and established artists critically engaging with these concerns on their own campy, poetic, sexual, humorous, and even utopian terms, using a variety of aesthetic approaches such as digital video, homemade effects, saturated 8mm, home movies, animation, green screen, and more.

CHANNELING is a film and video program curated by Latham Zearfoss and Ethan White.

Video portraits of activists, lawyers, artists, and people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, accused by the U.S. government of being or aiding terrorists, in these great times. Official selection of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. An ongoing series curated and produced by artist Paul Chan. A portion of the royalties earned by this program will be paid into The Friends of Claude Cahun Fund, and will fund future works in the series.

"All the shorts are experimental in their pairing of sound and image yet plainspoken in their address, and their portraiture is partly concerned with the glory of particular ways of being alive." 

--Jonathan Rosenbaum

"Recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, these amazing shorts bring us face to face with the intersections of art and politics in our present age. Artist and activist Paul Chan invited a number of video artists to create intimate portraits of individual political activists who have been sentenced to jail by the U.S. government. Subjects include Lynne Stewart, Steve Kurtz, and Mohammed Yousry." 

--PDX Film Festival website

The videos in this program invite the viewer to reconsider assumptions about regional and personal identity by offering a wide sampling of portraits: a group portrait, a street portrait, a family portrait, a self-portrait, a portrait of portraiture, and even a non-portrait. The diversity of these representations is as broad as the cultural and historical circumstances that have shaped the many cultures within Latin American and U.S. Latino/a communities. This particular group of videomakers has politicized their work by displaying these unique geographical characteristics and by forging links between self, history, and memory. The exploration and experimentations represented in Betraying Amnesia constitute a politically charged and significant contribution to what we know as video portraiture.

BETRAYING AMNESIA is  a film and video program curated by Dara Greenwald and Elizabeth Miller.

e-[d]entity: Female Perspectives on Identity in Digital Environments is a two-part collection of videoworks created from 1982-2000 that explores the cyber environment and how it affects, expands, confuses, and involves female identity.

Curated by Kathy Rae Huffman.

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Robyn Farrell. Taking inspiration from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s essay Reflections on the Electric Mirror, this program concentrates on work from the first decade of American video art and focuses on artists, who were influenced by and who pushed against the televisual impulse. The works in this program — by Lynda Benglis, Keith Sonnier, Susan Mogul, William Wegman, Nancy Holt, John Baldessari, Simone Forti, Paul and Marlene Kos, and Barbara Aronofsky Latham — derive from television both technologically and culturally, and serve as a catalogue of early experimentation with and in the closed circuit system.

This program is also avaliable on VDB TV: Decades, a unique five-disc compilation that casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form from the early 1970s to the present. This five-disc compilation was released during 2017 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. Each program was curated by an inspiring artist, scholar or media arts specialist who has focused on a specific decade, diving into the archive of the VDB to create personal, distinctive, and relevant programs, accompanied by original essays and texts. VDB TV: Decades is the perfect accompaniment to VDB’s iconic anthology Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. 1968-80, providing another essential tool for understanding the development of video and media art over the past five decades.

Desire and the Home: Program 1

Challenging the dominant ways of making and critiquing art, feminist art practice in the 1970s stressed personal connections to materials and immediacy of context over formal abstraction.

For many women, the home was a natural subject of artistic production as a highly charged site of rampantly contradictory meanings. As Lucy Lippard noted, "[women artists] work from such [household] imagery because it’s there, because it’s what they know best, because they can’t escape it." In Desire and the Home: Program 1, the artists explore domestic issues such as motherhood, sexuality, death, familial relationships, control of physical space and the preparation and consumption of food.

Please note that on this compilation "Chicken on Foot" is a 1:00 excerpt.

An original program for VDB TV curated by Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith. These striking videos each examine a force of feeling which is beyond emotion or affect, and which often elicit physical sensation.

VDB TV: Decades
2010s: Future-Past-Present

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Omar Kholeif.

"How can one even start to articulate the conditions that determine the artistic output of a decade that has started to experience such violent rupture? How does one give voice to a decade that began with the utopia of post-millennial transparency only to descend into a whirlpool of continual lies? ‘Post-truth’ is the accommodating misnomer that has been instrumentalized by news media to articulate the ‘alternative facts’ that have been propagated by the presidential campaign and policies of the newly-elected President of the United States, former reality TV star and real-estate mogul, Donald Trump."

— Omar Kholeif

This program is also avaliable on VDB TV: Decades, a unique five-disc compilation that casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form from the early 1970s to the present. This five-disc compilation was released during 2017 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. Each program was curated by an inspiring artist, scholar or media arts specialist who has focused on a specific decade, diving into the archive of the VDB to create personal, distinctive, and relevant programs, accompanied by original essays and texts. VDB TV: Decades is the perfect accompaniment to VDB’s iconic anthology Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. 1968-80, providing another essential tool for understanding the development of video and media art over the past five decades.

The emergence of video art tools in the late 1960s and early 1970s paved the way for an extraordinary number of outstanding art works by women. Captivated by the relative accessibility, portability and immediacy of Sony’s Video Portapak recording system, a significant number of female artists began to experiment with the video format. Often taking a direct-to-camera approach, many of the resulting works reflect the burgeoning feminist movement in the U.S. at the time.

The videos in this program, all made by women artists active in the 1970s — video’s first decade — occupy a number of positions and points of view in relation to women’s role in society. Several fascinating tendencies can be traced:

• The claiming of one’s own image, occurring at the very same moment that the female body was increasingly co-opted by the commercial world of advertising

• Video being utilized as a means to directly comment on a world where, to a great extent, men called the shots

• Video being used as a tool to disrupt and question notions of originality, ‘truth’ and identity, via feedback, looping and the static shot

• Video as a vehicle for humor and/or parody, whether directly mocking the self or, more often, mocking examples of the machinations of male hierarchies apparent throughout western society

— Abina Manning, VDB Executive Director

As the expansiveness of video and its accompanying new technologies continues to transform our culture and our world, another historical tension is developing—not unlike the technological revolution seen at the last turn of the century. That tension is felt, analyzed, and articulated in all of these recent experimental videos—a tension oscillating between the expansive promise of global communications that inspire new freedoms and social patterns on one hand, and the use of new media forms to simply reinforce existing hierarchies and capitalistic power structures on the other. The spectre of a "brave new world" looms on the horizon—one that is sanitized, homogenized, commodified, and Americanized: the new McLennium.

Curated by Mindy Faber.

Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image, produced by Bick Productions (Ilene Kurtz Kretzschmar and Caroline Bourgeois) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, was conceived to make accessible the work of some of the most important artists working in video, film, and digital imagery today. Point of View is the first commercially available anthology of its kind, serving as a point of entry to these new works, and as an ongoing resource for museums, universities, and art schools around the world. 

The Anthology consists of a boxed set of eleven all region DVD's, each containing a newly-commissioned work; an in-depth interview with the artist conducted by either Dan Cameron, senior curator at large at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist of the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville Paris, or Richard Meyer, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, University of Southern California; an image library of the artist's previous work; and biographical material. Subtitles are available in Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Japanese.

Generous Funding for Point of View has been provided by the Executive Directors: Jumex Collection, Mexico, and Blink Digital, New York, and Sponsor: The New Art Trust, San Francisco.

If you are interested in exhibiting the work on the set for any paid public performance, you must seek the approval of the artists.

The commodification of the American presidency is examined and lampooned in Presidents and Elections, a compilation of work from the Video Data Bank collection. Interweaving humorous, disquieting, and surreal videos with actual presidential campaign ads, the program highlights the evolving role of television as the driving force of electoral politics. Using appropriated media footage, parodic performance, historical reenactment, and other tactics, the artists represented in this program subvert and disrupt the inanity/insanity of dominant political discourse with their own forms of media manipulation.

Presidents and Elections — Program Listing

1. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000 (Antonio Muntadas & Marshall Reese, 2000): 1952 Eisenhower ad [0:22]

2. Excerpt from Spin (Brian Springer, 1995): Introduction [3:10]

3. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1960 Kennedy “It’s Up To You” ad [1:00]

4. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1960 ad of Jacqueline Kennedy speaking Spanish [1:00]

5. Excerpt from The Eternal Frame (Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco, 1976) [4:00]

6. Excerpt from Spin: “Making up the President” [2:55]

7. Perfect Leader (Max Almy, 1983) [4:00]

8. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1968 Nixon ad [1:00]

9. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1976 Ford “Feeling Good About America” ad [1:00]

10. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1976 “We Need Jimmy Carter” ad [0:40]

11. Decision 80 (Jim Finn, 2003) [10:00]

12. The Speech (Doug Hall, 1982) [4:00]

13. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1980 Reagan ad [0:30]

14. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1984 Reagan ad [0:55]

15. Excerpt from Spin: “Making the News” [7:00]

16. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 1988 Dukakis “The Packaging of George Bush” ad, two 1988 George Bush ads [2:00]

17. Excerpt from Political Advertisment 2000: 1992 Pat Buchanan ad [0:30]

18. Excerpt from Stoney Does Houston (Bob Hercules, 1992) [4:10]

19. Election Collectibles (Bryan Boyce, 2000) [4:00]

20. Excerpt from Spin: “The Democratic Make-Up” [5:10]

21. Excerpt from Political Advertisement 2000: 2000 George W. Bush ad [0:30]

22. State of the Union (Bryan Boyce, 2001) [1:43]

Total running time: 58:43 minutes

VDB TV: Decades
1980s: Problematizing Pleasure / Punk Theory

An original program for VDB TV: Decades curated by Steve Reinke.

"I was born in 1963, and so the 1980s mean something to me, but I’m not sure what. I think it good, for instance, that I didn’t get AIDS and die. Also, that I only flirted with semiotics. Like cybernetics, which started in the 1950s, grew to dominance in the 1960s and simply faded away in the 1970s, we once believed in semiotics. In the 1980s, it was the way to understand how images contained meanings/produced discourses, and how texts circulate. (How do they circulate? Intertextually.) Perhaps semiotics was the dying gasp of modernism, a conservative strain of modernism posing as postmodernism. The death of the author resulting not in the birth of the reader, but in the birth of a severe, obscure, hermetic semiotician."

 — Steve Reinke

This program is also avaliable on VDB TV: Decades, a unique five-disc compilation that casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form from the early 1970s to the present. This five-disc compilation was released during 2017 in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Video Data Bank. Each program was curated by an inspiring artist, scholar or media arts specialist who has focused on a specific decade, diving into the archive of the VDB to create personal, distinctive, and relevant programs, accompanied by original essays and texts. VDB TV: Decades is the perfect accompaniment to VDB’s iconic anthology Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. 1968-80, providing another essential tool for understanding the development of video and media art over the past five decades.

Curated by Lebanese video artist Akram Zaatari, and originally presented by the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Radical Closure features works produced in response to situations of physical or ideological closure resulting from war and territorial conflicts. The program looks at what is known as the Middle East, and how the moving image has functioned throughout its history, charged with division, political tension, and mobilization. This 5-DVD box set has an accompanying monograph with curator’s essay, and features important work by 24 artists including Guy Ben-Ner, Harun Farocki, Mona Hatoum, Walid Raad, and Elia Suleiman. Many of the titles on Radical Closure are being made available to educational audiences for the first time.

 

This first program deals with stories of captivity. To start, Hostage: The Bachar tapes by Walid Raad presents us with an imagined hostage presumably held in custody along with the American hostages in Lebanon during the 1980’s. Raad’s work reflects on the invention and communication of stories about abduction, insisting on the families’ unity in the face of threats, and reads through the fears and sexual fantasies of the kidnapped Americans who are held in the same cell with a Lebanese man. The next piece is a personal documentary by Namir Abdel Messeeh, in which he talks to his father, trying to understand the complex situation that led to him being a political prisoner in Egypt. In Winter at Last, Nurit Sharett looks at herself as a captive in a state that separates her from her friends, going in extreme directions; a Swiss woman who leaves by choice, and a Palestinian friend who can no longer cross into Israel. Finally a parable about captivity, a prisoner of domestic life: Guy Ben-Ner in House Hold.

Curated by Lebanese video artist Akram Zaatari, and originally presented by the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Radical Closure features works produced in response to situations of physical or ideological closure resulting from war and territorial conflicts. The program looks at what is known as the Middle East, and how the moving image has functioned throughout its history, charged with division, political tension, and mobilization. This 5-DVD box set has an accompanying monograph with curator’s essay, and features important work by 24 artists including Guy Ben-Ner, Harun Farocki, Mona Hatoum, Walid Raad, and Elia Suleiman. Many of the titles on Radical Closure are being made available to educational audiences for the first time.

This program presents different approaches to looking at war, and to using images of war. My Friend Imad and the Taxi is an unfinished work from two amateur filmmakers, both passionate about film, who lived in Beirut in the eighties when the city looked like the set from a war film. Samir’s work looks at the intersection between (H)istory and (h)is story as lived at home. While Farocki’s piece looks subversively at war from the point of view of the industrial machinery used to collect images-–almost a scientific approach--Salhab’s video presents us with a poetic portrait of a people and a city full of scars.