VideoCube 02

VideoCube is an international platform aimed at the presentation of videoart works. Its ambition is to create permanent exhibitions and possibilities for confrontation with the given media in the Central European area. The platform is an extension of the 4 Elements Film Seminar in Banská Štiavnica and takes place in Banská St a nica Contemporary.

The first year of VideoCube 01 (2014), organised by transKUNSTHALLE, was aimed at presenting how videoart has evolved since the fall of the Iron Curtain until now. The exhibited works were a strong reaction to the challenges that the changes in political, economic and social conditions presented in the Visegrad group countries since the early nineties. The compilers of the individual “national” collections for the first year, Piotr Bernatowiz (PL), Szabolcs KissPál (HU) and Katarína Rusnáková (SVK), created a six-hour long set of videoart works, focused mainly on those social discourses in the home countries that brought about strongly critical remarks upon the processes and values of the European culture.

The second year – VideoCube 02 (2015) – fills a gap in the presentation by integrating a Czech selection of works under the guardianship of Jiří Ptáček titled The Human Body Temperature. “The selection of videos and animations by some young as well as middle-aged Czech authors was inspired by 16 Degrees, a short animation by Jan Nálevka from 2013. The fast sequence of random numbers in the animation appears to have no particular meaning. In fact it is an enumeration of all the values given in degrees Celsius at which the human body is capable of life. The intention of The Human Body Temperature compilation is to give an insight into the spectrum of the views upon our human existence as at a state that is now more than ever defined by our inner systems.” The selected artists: Zbyněk Baladrán, Martin Kohout, Jan Nálevka, Martina Růžičková, Matěj Smetana, Tomáš Svoboda and others. The Slovak set titled Hypertension compiled by Anton Čierny (SK) contains works by such authors as András Cséfalvay, Jakub Gavalier, Katarína Karafová, Zoltán Nagy, Erik Sikora or Martin Špirec. It constitutes a heterogeneous mix where the works differ by their thematic focus as well as their “language”, yet they have a common denominator – searching for the alternatives to “one’s own prison”. These alternatives can be understood as comments on the diagnoses of the civilization evolution.

Anton Čierny

Opening of the Slovak collection, Wednesday, August 5^th 2015, 18:00, Banská St a nica

Opening of the Czech collection, Friday, August 7^th 2015, 18:00, Banská St a nica