(EVA14) Experimental Video Art Exhibition, Thai-European Friendship 2017

 

                 I’ve always refused to see competitors in all my colleagues In an interview for an article I was asked how I see my ”function“ as an artist in the current capitalistic societies. And if there were any interventions still left to do - or ”aren’t artists producing just another type of commodity“?

                 I replied that I actually see art as one of the last remaining opportunities for individual design and personal creative intervention in the one eld that is so important: the transformation of language and image, in the emancipatory public sphere and in sociopolitical utopia. Yes, still ”utopia“. Society claims many aspects but not everything; not the domain of dif cult and subtle things and of mental assertions, not the underground and not the unpopular, nor free and critical thought, as long as we live in democracies and can offer resistance. I have always refused to see competitors in all my colleagues, though this is an attitude that the capitalist system presupposes us artists to adopt. In fact I believe more in the energy element of art than in its money element. According to this attitude - and I am not the only one to see art like this - I nd colleagues who share the idea in a similar way. I found them all over the world and their number seems to increase. Since 2000 I’ve been working as artist-curator, like several artists do, alongside with my own permanent work and I regard it as project-art and a logic fruit of the ”sharing“ principle, of philosophy and art-research. When Komson Nookiew started to study with Professor Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna around 1995, that master class was widely open for international students and the common language was English. Art as a process was actually the topic, rather than the art-object itself. The ”coming together“ was celebrated and later continued in Pistoletto’s own project Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy: ”Creativity becomes also procreation. It takes two to create. Art as a re ection of life gives back to energy its power of self-identi cation ...“ (Pistoletto quoted). What stands behind this is the simple idea of sharing, as a living principle to be spread all over the world. It seems to me that Komson Nookiew is constantly and obsessively working on that, since he had left Vienna and restarted his work in Bangkok. 

                  In 2005 he was asked to participate with a video- compilation (of more than 20 artists, mostly Thai, some European) at my former project „FARANG, Thai-Austri- an Art and Friendship“, Vienna (at MACHFELD, Kunsthalle Wien project-space, Fotogalerie Wien). This was one year after my own rst visit to Bangkok and Chiang Mai, some lectures at Universities there and two performances at Festival Asiatopia. Since then we collaborate from time to time, and I witness his successful annual project "EVA – Experimental Video Art", until now and agree with colleague Evamaria Schaller: EVA is not an ”experiment“ any more, it is a lived experience of bringing together different cultures and their points of view“ (catalogue for the exhibition at BACC, 2014). So this year it is our turn to provide another step into such professional exchange and we are glad to invite a selection of recent video art - to Murau (”art contains“, annual project by Gertrude Moser-Wagner) and to Schaumbad Graz, curated by Eva Ursprung, in July 2017, both are cities in Styria/Austria. By the way – both of us are women-artists whose videos were also included in Komson’s above mentioned compilation of 2005. This makes sense and will stimulate our visitors and ourselves to mutual cross- cultural understanding. Allow me a last remark to the students at Thai Universities and all those who bene t from the video-screenings and future exhibitions of EVA: Grasp the essence and the spirit of making, experiencing and sharing this video-art, and art in general, in a sustainable way, in short: never stop sharing your energy, always create enlivenment! 

Gertrude Moser-Wagner, Vienna, 2017 

                           EVA – document of cultural transformation
                            “Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures ...” 

                 Pictures that move and move you! Since the 60s the way of using technical equipment and the quality of the vid- eo-material changed whole generations. Instead of huge video cameras with magnetic tapes we shoot with our mobile phones in full HD-quality. All latest art- and scienti c technologies are used for Video-Art-productions. In the past everything which had to do with technologies mainly men were working on. The medium video and the free usage of technology changed a whole art-system. It is a gender-free medium which gives freedom as well as political in uence. A lot of female artists use/d this way of artistic expression like Joan Jonas, Ana Medieta, Ann Hamilton, Pipilotti Rist, Dara Birnbaum just to mention some women who became art history. “Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast; installations viewed in galleries or museums; works streamed online, distributed as video tapes, or DVDs; and performances which may incorporate one or more television sets, video monitors, and projections, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sounds;.[1]”
                   Although Video Art arrived in the art-market. it is still treated as minor little sister of the Fine-Arts. Videos like other art-products always raise questions of: How to sell it? How to present it? But the main question is: How to preserve it? It is not like a painting you hang up. You can upload it onto the web or let it die on an external re wire drive because the technology develops so fast that the way of how to encode or store digital material becomes a major question. But there are some notable video art organisations who focus on presenting and preserving it. Because of the vast amount of mobile phones with great implemented cameras billions of videos are viral. The amount of moving images we are able and forced to see every day grows every second. Important and non important stages of our lives are spread out into the WWW, the biggest brain which never forgets? 

                   Most of the latest wars and rebellions where captures through mobile-cameras and we take every propaganda as true proof. So how can we distinguish between Video-Art or a viral tweet in a microblogging service? We are trained to perceive and judge in a very quick way, scroll through movies, don ́t watch them fully because of our impatience and time pressure. We read the headlines and not whole article. It is the same everywhere: Everybody wants to grasp an art piece in seconds and is irritated when consumption and processing takes time. Video Art is about time and timing. It has the strength to re ect our systems, political in uences, own wishes and dreams in the process of watching. So why don ́t we take time to share the visions of the video artists in the EVA-project. EVA is a kind of time-capture in itself. After 12 years of existence it preserves a great amount of video art-production. It shows cultural transformations in different parts of the world. Video is one of the quickest mediums to re ect society and EVA is one of the longest continuous existing Video-Art-exhibitions worldwide. It is showing different needs and cultural transformations in these last decades. Artists who showed their rst works in EVA are showing new ones and even that is another way of transformation – it shows artistic process and progress in this huge video-archive collected by Komson Nookiew and other.
The Experimental Video Art Exhibition EVA highlights the Thai-European friendship. It understands this multicultural platform not as a tool for showing the differences between cultures and languages, but as a tool of encountering and exchange. The desire to produce a meeting point keeps it moving. The Video-Art ows on between zones of misunderstandings and at the same time rede nitions of society.
[1] Hartney, Mick. “Video art”, MoMA, accessed January 31, 2011 Wikipedia uses the words of rst generation video-artist and video art chronicler Mick Hartney to de ne video-art. 

Evamaria Schaller