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Video Data Bank Newsletter
May 2021
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Video Data Bank Announcment
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Warm spring time greetings from Chicago, where VDB staff are beginning to venture again into the office. In so many ways, change is in the air.
I’m writing to let you know that after 22 years, 15 of them as Director, I am going to be leaving Video Data Bank — my last day will be May 14th. Doubtless everyone I’ve worked with, including my colleagues at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and especially the artists, curators, and many users of the collection who inspire and challenge me, knows how much I have relished my time at VDB. It’s been an absolute thrill to work with you all since I relocated here from London in 1999. Video Data Bank has been my passion, and the work of my life. However, the incredibly challenging period we still find ourselves in has caused me to reconsider some of my priorities going forward, and I have decided to relocate to Berlin to be with my partner, and closer to family. I will continue to be VDB’s biggest cheerleader as I pursue projects that highlight moving image art and artists.
Video Data Bank celebrates its 45th anniversary this year; I’m proud to have played a part in ensuring the organization’s longevity, the collection’s depth, and its long-term future. I’ve worked on some amazing projects with my colleagues at VDB: anthologies, box sets and monographs; preservation and digitization projects; establishment of the Videofreex and Kuchar Archives; the VDB TV streaming channel; and the Decades compilation, as well as commissioning amazing writers and curators to elucidate the collection. Particularly thrilling for me has been presenting work from the collection to live audiences — be it in a museum, a classroom, or a local backyard screening.
Personal highlights from my tenure include witnessing the artists we represent going on to influence contemporary thought, politics, and culture through their activities. It’s been a pleasure to witness both emerging and established artists come into their own, and be recognized for their art and labor. VDB has the enormous privilege of collaborating with amazing partners — exhibition venues, educators, festivals, and more. And I’ve been fortunate to serve with foundations, on grant panels, and festival juries to support artists’ work. I thank each of those I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside for all that you do.
The Video Data Bank collection is an amazing entity, with countless treasures to be discovered and re-discovered, analyzed, and exhibited. The soon-to-be-launched VDB Educational Streaming Website (watch this space!) will enable many titles from the collection to be discovered afresh, and will bring new artists and works into focus. It’s very exciting.
I will collaborate with Video Data Bank in various ways going forward, and will be reachable at abina@vdb.org. In the meantime, I am happy that my capable and esteemed colleague and friend Tom Colley will serve as Interim Director going forward, along with Zachary Vanes as Distribution Manager, Lauren Pirritano as Media Producer, and the rest of the VDB team.
Wishing you the very best. Here’s to a radical and creative future!
Abina Manning
Director
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Kings of the Sky on VDB TV
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Video Data Bank is proud to present Kings of the Sky, by artist Deborah Stratman, on VDB TV. Kings of the Sky is an experimental documentary about resistance, balance, and fame, and follows tightrope artist Adil Hoxur as he and his troupe tour China’s Taklamakan desert amongst the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people seeking religious and political autonomy.
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Receive 15% off with the purchase of any single title or compilation for educational purchase, valid through August 30th, 2021
Save on groundbreaking experimental work for your media collection! Now through August 30th, VDB is excited to offer a 15% discount with any purchase. Order one of our Box Sets, Curated Compilations, Single Artist Compilations, and Single Titles, and provide students, faculty, and researchers with direct access to critically important video art of historical and contemporary significance. Use coupon code EDU1521 at checkout. Some exceptions apply. Contact us at info@vdb.org with any questions.
Additionally, Kevin Jerome Everson's box set Broad Daylight and Other Times will be available at a new reduced price of $375.
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Girls | Museum
Shelly Silver
2020 | 01:11:20 | Germany | Dari/ German | Color | Stereo |16:9 | HD video
We are born into an already-constructed world. We each enter with new eyes into a culture that has already been shaped and structured based on the desires and power of others. Historical art museums are charged with preserving and interpreting the tangible evidence of a civilization’s cultural trajectory and artistic achievement. The artworks they display have overwhelmingly been made, collected and contextualized by men. On the walls of their hushed galleries, there is no lack of depictions of women on display – mothers, wives, prostitutes, artist’s models and muses, all seen through the eyes of male artists.
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Citadel
John Smith
2020 | 16:05 | United Kingdom | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
Filmed from the artist’s window during lockdown, Citadel combines short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline recorded in a variety of weather conditions. Recognizing the government’s decision to place business interests before public health, it relocates the centre of power from Parliament to the financial district of the City of London. Shifting its focus from the city’s gleaming skyscrapers to the inhabitants of the dense urban housing that lies in their shadow, Citadel contrasts faceless corporate power with the particularities of individual lives.
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Covid Messages
John Smith
2020 | 22:16 | United Kingdom | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
Covid Messages is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The work focuses on the British government’s attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals. While the pandemic spreads and the death toll rises, the Prime Minister makes repeated errors of judgement. Exasperated by his many mistakes, the spirits of the dead rise up and intervene.
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The Landing
Akram Zaatari
2019 | 01:03:00 | Lebanon/ United Arab Emirates | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
Whether they inhabit the desert or are lost in it, three men are clearly confronted by the ruins of modern times. They are explorers or players or performers of times past. Their encounters, their moves, their assessment of location, take the form of an acoustic sounding of space. Filmed in Shaabiyat al Ghurayfah in Sharjah, a repertoire of simple gestures playfully engages with structure, space, movement, threshold, surveillance and perspective. Cables, sewage pipes, tubes, shovels, kitchen tools, electric air blowers, and even a helicopter landing on site are all deployed in this film for their sonic rather than narrative potential — creating refractions, confrontations and transformations in a broken or folded narrative.
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On Photography Dispossession and Times of Struggle
Akram Zaatari
2017 | 37:00 | Lebanon | Arabic | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
Taking the idea of loss and dispossession as a starting point, this second reflection on photography and its people looks at the individual’s position within the context of war and how photographs become the sole record of that displacement, at the risk of them being dispersed as well. This is a sequel to On Photography People and Modern Times. It represents at once a search for photographs, a research on photography in modern times and a story of displacement of thousands of photographs from private, sometimes intimate, spaces in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, into the archive of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. The film is based on rushes that Akram Zaatari videotaped himself while doing his research on photography between 1998 and 2000.
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The Script
Akram Zaatari
2018 | 06:30 | Lebanon/ United Kingdom | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video
A man prays in the Muslim tradition while his children try to distract him by climbing on his back. This is a recurring scenario that many try to film at home and upload on YouTube. This film reenacts the script to show the tender side of a father praying.
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MoMA’s Modern Mondays series will feature the work of Erika Beckman, May 10th — May 24th.
Light and Language, an exhibition curated by Lisa Le Feuvre featuring the work of artists influenced by Nancy Holt, highlights A.K. Burns, among others.
Light Industry’s website currently features a discussion between Sky Hopinka and Tiffany Sia.
Congratulations to Ephraim Asili, Dara Birnbaum, A.K. Burns, Cauleen Smith, and all the other wonderful artists recently announced as Guggenheim Fellows!
Artforum features an interview with artist Lucy Raven, on reimagining the genre of the western in her current Dia: Chelsea exhibition.
Artists Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby and Filipa César will be screening at Images Film Festival. Video Data Bank is sponsor of the program Techniques of Observation, which will be taking place on Tuesday, May 25th, and features the work of Kevin Jerome Everson, Lindsay MacIntyre, Kush Badhwar, and Riar Rizaldi.
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