Activities

Time Code IV is a video programme that features the pieces included in the fourth Time Code, an international project founded in 1986 by a group of broadcast directors and programming heads from the most important television stations, along with independent producers from several countries. It uses television as a medium for visual communication and cultural exchange, respecting the identity of each participant and also guaranteeing that countries with fewer possibilities can take part with their own productions. The project is structured such that each of the participants produces a short piece by a video artist from their country and in exchange receives an international programme with all of the pieces produced by the other countries for the event. In each case, the main challenge is to create an international network of broadcast directors, programming heads and cultural programme producers to establish communication and cooperation in the field of images. Time Code I presented seven productions by internationally renowned video artists like Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), Gusztav Hamos (Budapest, 1955), Brenda Miller (New York, 1941) and Xavier Villaverde (La Coruña, 1958). Time Code II featured twelve video clips under the generic title of Transfer Musical and included the Spanish piece Ruedo 360, 5600º K by Gustavo Martínez, which was acquired by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for its presentation at the Moving Image Biennial. Time Code III, entitled Rituals of Love, presented seven videos related to the theme of love and included the participation of the Museo Reina Sofía.

At the point where films on art are at their most inventive and creative, Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, 1973) has long been a target, the object of inquiry and seduction. Trapped by a silent and almost forgotten attraction, the cinema has focused on his oeuvre, a motionless immensity in time. After the Second World War, when films on art appeared in France, Belgium and Italy, three essential pioneers in the genre made - within years of each other - three key films in the history of films on art, all about Picasso’s work: Guernica (1949) by Robert Hessens and Alain Resnais (Vannes, 1922), Visite à Picasso (1950) by Paul Haesaerts (Boom, 1901 - Brussels, 1974) and Picasso (1953) by Luciano Emmer (Milan, 1918 - Rome, 2009). It is almost impossible to imagine all the films that have been made about the artist since then and difficult to realise that, going back a bit further in time, other films could emerge from where they lie hidden to take their place on the long list of works dedicated to the painter from Malaga. The result would be 140 hours of screen time, i.e., an uninterrupted programme of five and a half days. In these otherworldly sessions, the painter and his work would appear on the screen, in forms ranging from drawings to ink, engravings to sculpture, from collage to oils, ceramics and pottery. Nothing would interrupt the artist’s work except for the changing of the reels in the projector, brief intervals in this permanent cinema session. The fascinated viewer would then take a kind of condensed, stunning tour through the work of a lifetime.

VideoFest '93 brings together a selection from the sixth Berlin Video Festival. Until the mid-1980s, video was only a small section within the International Forum of Young Film. In 1988, the Forum dedicated itself entirely to video, which was the signal for MedienOperative to organise an autonomous festival to present independent video work. Since then, VideoFest has grown and advanced to become one of the most important international video festivals. The sixth festival, held in 1993, included 241 tapes from 21 countries and attracted more than 6,000 viewers. The microcosm from the selection that is presented here reveals the character of the festival: programmes with structured content in which all genres are represented, from computer animation and video art to documentaries and narrative video fiction. Poetic videos are presented alongside decively political works, with innovative power and the search for a new visual language always used as the selection criteria.

Demontage: Film, Video/Appropriation, Recycling brings together more than 70 works by artists from diverse backgrounds, regardless of whether they were made using celluloid or video. With the indiscriminate mix of both media, the programme takes a look at different themes and focus points following related paths that branch off from each other. All of these projects (which run between 3 and 45 minutes) are based on materials from outside sources: images that are either found, appropriated, pillaged or legally obtained from archives and other sources, texts, sounds and other elements, waste and scrap material that has been taken and recycled for a purpose different from what it was originally created for. For the most part, these images and materials are recognisable because of their industrial, media, inflexible origin: images, stereotypes, messages or detritus from films, television, advertisements, propaganda, audiovisual archives, etc. In turn, they are mainly works that have a critical nature, a deconstruction or demontage of what the images or messages wanted to say or dictate in their previous life or in their original montage.

In just two years of existence, the Centre International de Création Vidéo Montbéliard-Belfort (CICV) has become a model for audiovisual creation and teaching. Now, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is presenting a small sample of its co-productions from the selection made by Pierre Bongiovanni, the centre’s director. Since the first Manifestation Internationale de Video et Television Montbéliard held in 1982, this biannual festival has gone from strength to strength to become one of the oldest international festivals around. As a result of the success and integrity of the event in 1991, the CICV, a unique institution in its genre, opened its doors. The CICV promotes work and research visits for video artists, producers, teachers, researchers and creators, who live together for the time they need to get their projects done. The initial goal of this centre was to create laboratories that are “decentralised, autonomous, organised into networks, traversed by creative flashes of resistance, lethargy and investigation”, to support the production of independent videos and educational and cultural television programmes.

In February 1992, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía’s Department of Audiovisual Works began organising the Moving Image Biennial ’92: Spanish Visionaries, dedicated solely to the work of Spanish audiovisual artists. The goal of the exhibition is to settle a debt with the artists who have used film, television, video and synthetic images and who have investigated and worked with these languages in Spain, taking a visionary and often daring approach. The intention of the exhibition is to both recover and revitalise video production in the country.