TIMELOOP was a unique cross-venue programme that explored one of the most influential art forms of the twentieth century - video art. With artists video populating Scottish galleries increasingly, TIMELOOP linked some of Glasgows arts venues around a shared international thematic of media art production within a German context.

The season presented installations at CCA and Street Level Photoworks, and offered a rich series of talks extending to Glasgow School of Art, Gallery of Modern Art and Tramway. These topics made up a central but often neglected chapter in recent art history, but one that is gaining greater critical momentum and recognition.

TIMELOOP was presented in association with the Goethe-Institut, Glasgow and Arts Development Department of Glasgow City Council.

A slideshow selection of images of the opening at Street Level, Sandra Thomas' talk, CCA talk and Spectrum Launch, GFT and Gallery of Modern Art talks.

EVENTS AT STREET LEVEL
TALK
Sat 14th April, 3pm

Sandra Thomas from ‘imai – inter media art institute’
The foundation imai - intermedia art institute is Germany´s first non-profit institution dedicated to support the distribution, preservation and research of video and media based arts. Cooperations with curators, universities and institutions provide the necessary international platform for the represented artists. imai is an open forum for an international community dealing with questions of exhibition, preservation and dissemination of audio-visual arts. The aim of imai is also to support research in the fields of media art through cooperation with universities and art academies and by initiating and coordinating research projects. Among the scheduled regularly held events are video screenings, lectures, conferences, seminars and exhibition projects like the extensive Gary Hill show Values in autumn 2007. Sandra Thomas, co-Director of imai will discuss the institutions work, with contributions from the artist Myriam Thyes in the context of ‘TIMELOOP’.


EXHIBITIONS

Sat 14th April – Sat 19th May
Multiple Madonna by Myriam Thyes
Maalesh by Boaz Kaizman
MediaArtArchive


Multiple Madonna (a video-triptych 2002-2007, duration 9 minute loop): On each screen of the installation the same process is shown in three variations: a Russian matryoshka stacking doll is pulled apart, then the 10 dolls are placed one inside the other again. Thyes painted the inside of the dolls in red, black and white, a colour combination which in many cultures and religions has a mythical significance. The text, spoken by a female voice, names elementary things, situations and feelings that may happen to all of us. The regular movement of the hands, the hard-edged bright colours and the geometrical order, as well as the spoken sentences give the process a ritual character.

The triptych installation Multiple Madonna and the matryoshka doll itself are reminiscent of multiple goddess myths and of ancient mother-daughter genealogies. Despite these references, these ‘rituals’ appear to be both solemn and somehow peculiar and light: the way children play; they take serious what they do and yet know, that everything could be quite different.

Myriam Thyes studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf with Professor Nan Hoover. Her works are concerned with the analysis and re-evaluation of cultural symbols of power and belief, and an exploration of gender roles, colonialism and myths. Her ongoing participatory project is Flag Metamorphoses, an exploration into the meaning of imagery on flags, aiming to create interrelated associations through questioning, reassessing, fluidizing and re-mixing of diverse national iconography.


Maalesh (video projection, 2004, duration 22 minutes looped) by Boaz Kaizman (in cooperation with Eric Sick) (which is Arabic for ‘never mind’), is based on an interview with Prof. David Galloway, the former director of the Teheran Museums of Contemporary Art (1977-78), which was a gift from the Empress of Iran to her people on her 40th birthday. Shortly after the museum was opened, the Islamic revolution in Iran started, and Prof. Galloway had to leave the country. Kaizman places the off-camera recording of Galloway’s tales over striking images of a collection of Persian carpets, filmed from above, like pages turning in a book.

Kaizman not only works on video: rather he crosses the borders between different cultures, media, and art forms. Objects and words are arranged not as an easily-consumable whole, and through their tension something rather new arises.

Boaz Kaizman was born in Tel Aviv in 1962. He studied in Israel at the Avni Institute and the Ramat-Hasharon Academy for Teachers of Art. In Germany he studied at Art Academy in Düsseldorf. Single and group exhibitions of Kaizman’s work have been presented in Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Serbia and Chile. Since 1993, he lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Maalesh is in the collection of Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Street Level also presents MediaArtArchive, the digital catalogue of the foundation imai - intermedia art institute. The extensive database makes video art accessible online. It now contains 1200 video art works and numerous additional documents. A continuous expansion of the collection is scheduled.

The Content Management System, developed to deal with the demands of time- and space-based media art works, offers the possibility to archive audio-visual art works adequate to the media-inherent qualities and with a maximum of consistency. Users may query the database by artists, titles, year of creation and keywords and preview whole works or single sequences in preview quality. Additional information, metadata and accompanying documents such as synopses of the works as well as artists’ biographies will enhance the insight into media art and its cultural context. This way it establishes an art historical context for contemporary works and is an instrument to reveal links and historical lines.



Events Diary
Thurs 12th April - 6pm Gallery of Modern Art - Talk by Doris Krystof.
Fri 13th April - 10.30am - Glasgow Film Theatre - Lecture by Doris Krystof.
Fri 13th April - 7pm - Centre for Contemporary Arts - ‘Spectrum’ launch.
Sat 14th April - 12noon - Centre for Contemporary Arts - Talk by Nan Hoover.
Sat 14th April - 3pm - Street Level Photoworks - Talk by Sandra Thomas.
Sat 14th April - 5pm - Street Level Photoworks - ‘TIMELOOP’ reception.
Weds 18th April - 6.30pm - Tramway - Lecture by Jochen Gerz.

14th April – 12th May - Centre for Contemporary Arts
‘Spectrum’. Installations by Nan Hoover and Nina Könnemann.
’40 Years Video Art’, medialounge.

14th April – 19th May - Street Level Photoworks - Installations by Myriam Thyes and Boaz Kaizman - ‘MediaArtArchive’.


TALKS

Thursday 12th April, 6pm
Gallery of Modern Art
‘Exhibiting Artists Film And Video’: an illustrated talk by Doris Krystof,
curator at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.
During the 1980s a significant development from monitor presentation to installation occured. On the eve of digital production, the medium video not only became established as a pictorial process but was also being used as a means of documentation. In 2006 a Düsseldorf exhibition which was part of the project 40yearsvideoart.de focused on the different aspects within artistic video work in the 1980s in West Germany. In view of the zeitgeist, private television, population census, Neue Deutsche Welle and punk, the genuinely socio-political, democratic and utopian dimensions of video reached their peak during the last years of the German Federal republic. The presentation of specific video works from the 80s in formats especially designed for an exhibition room in 2006 is to be discussed.

Friday 13th April, 10.30am
Glasgow School of Art
SoFA lecture (at GFT)
‘As if memories could deceive me...’
an illustrated lecture by Doris Krystof
History and Politics in 1980s Video Art in Germany, with examples from works by Marcel Odenbach, Danica Dakic, Korpys/Löffler et al.
Doris Krystof (b. 1961) studied history of art, literature and history and wrote her PhD thesis on Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1618). She has been working as a researcher and curator of contemporary art since 1993 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Kunsthalle Vienna). Since 2001 she has been curator of K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Saturday 14th April 12noon
Centre for Contemporary Arts
Talk by Nan Hoover

Saturday 14th April, 3pm
Street Level Photoworks
‘imai – inter media art institute’
The foundation imai - intermedia art institute is Germany´s first non-profit institution dedicated to support the distribution, preservation and research of video and media based arts. Cooperations with curators, universities and institutions provide the necessary international platform for the represented artists. imai is an open forum for an international community dealing with questions of exhibition, preservation and dissemination of audio-visual arts. The aim of imai is also to support research in the fields of media art through cooperation with universities and art academies and by initiating and coordinating research projects. Among the scheduled regularly held events are video screenings, lectures, conferences, seminars and exhibition projects like the extensive Gary Hill show Values in autumn 2007. Sandra Thomas, co-Director of imai will discuss the institutions work, with contributions from the artists Myrian Thyes and Boaz Kaizman in the context of ‘TIMELOOP’.

Wednesday 18th April, 6.30pm
Tramway
Lecture by Jochen Gerz
Jochen Gerz will talk about his video practice with relation to his work Rufen bis zur Erschöpfung / To Cry Until Exhaustion [1972, 19’30’’] where, on the grounds of what would become Charles de Gaulle Airport, Gerz calls out in the direction of a camera and a microphone until his voice gives out. Jochen Gerz is an internationally renowned artist who explores issues of human rights and social change through the creation of monuments and projects all over the world. He will also give a talk at Common Work, Tramway’s conference on socially engaged art practice (April 19/20).

EXHIBITIONS
Saturday 14th April – Saturday 12th May
Centre for Contemporary Arts
‘Spectrum’
Nan Hoover
Nina Könnemann
40yearsvideoart.de
Gallery Times: Tues – Fri: 11am – 6pm, Sat: 11am – 6pm, Closed Sun & Mon
A medialounge at the CCA presents 40yearsvideoart.de plus the work of two prominent female artists, Nan Hoover and Nina Könnemann, whose work spans this era.

Nan Hoover was born in New York, USA, in 1931 and is currently working and living in Berlin, Germany. It 1973 Hoover started experimenting with video, both functioning as an extension of her painting practice and as a documentary medium. The work remains centred around linear, real-time scenes that are left relatively unedited. By using her own body as the primary artistic device in the works she is authoring, Hoover challenges dominant Western codes of representation, in which women are always the object and never the subject of the gaze. The videos often explore a visual ambiguity between body and landscape or abstract and ‘natural’ forms, being pervaded by an internal rhythm or pulse created by subtle, ongoing movements of light and form. Through these techniques Hoover presses viewers to consider the physical and psychoanalytic conditions of visibility and to evaluate the question of how they are linked to the formation of the subject.

Nina Könnemann devotes herself to public spaces, non places and to undramatic events as in Unrise and M.U.D. where one observes the early morning scenery on the day after an open-air concert, or in Castles made of Sand, which atmospherically captures places lodged underground.
‘The people in Könnemann’s videos always look like they’re on the run. They dash about for no apparent reason, constantly in motion, coolly followed by the camera; they never rest, never stand still. These are lost figures in a nonplace at an indeterminate time of day, torn free of all social relations, isolated, lonely and yet a part of the all-encompassing mass, able to be formed and yet individualist; they are the agonists of our leisure time, a society of pleasure seekers attempting to escape the dreary everyday.’ Artforum International Magazine, 2003, Translated from German by Sara Ogger.

The medialounge at the CCA presents ‘40yearsvideoart.de: Digital Heritage: Video Art in Germany From 1963 To The Present’ an initiative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation and realised by ZKM Karlsruhe and K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen Düsseldorf. 40yearsvideoart.de - Digital Heritage is a ground-breaking project which focuses on saving, maintaining, and mediating the cultural heritage of video art.

In 2004, a jury compiled an exemplary selection of 59 single-channel works from 1963 up to the present, which included pioneers of the early years as well as younger artists and thus presenting a variety of formats and artistic strategies. Over the course of the next two years, original master tapes, sub-masters, first and second generation copies were evaluated and restorative work was carried out, using the latest techniques and methods, and all works were stored on high-quality digital formats.
40yearsvideoart.de is accompanied by two major publications: a comprehensive, full-colour catalogue which includes excerpts of all the works on a DVD-ROM, and a DVD Study Edition with all the selected works in their full length, and all available to view at the CCA.Saturday .