video art from central and eastern europe 1989–2009 Edited by Edit András Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, 2009 This volume has been produced as the accompanying publication of the project Contents Transitland | Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989−2009 Publisher’s Preface | 7 Project co-organisers: Editor’s Preface and Acknowledgements | 9 Essays InterSpace Association, Project director | Margarita Dorovska Marina Gržini‡ | Video in the Time of a Double, Political and Technological Project curator | Kathy Rae Huffman Transition in the Former Eastern European Context | 17 Assistant project manager | Julia Mercurio | Technical development | Milen Hristov Boris Groys | From the Image to the Image File—and Back | 35 transmediale—festival for art and digital culture berlin, Transitland commissions, director | Stephen Kovats Giorgio Bertellini | Making Spaces at War: Notes on Video Art and Space in Marina Gržini‡ & Aina Šmid’s Luna 10 and Bilocation | 45 Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest | ACAX Project curators | Rita Kálmán, Tijana Stepanovi‡ Zoran Eri‡ | The Question of Identity as Reflected through Video Art in ex-Yugoslavia | 57 Boris Buden | Getting Out of Here | 69 Associated partners: Svetlana Boym | Modernities Out of Sync: The Tactful Art of Anri Sala | 79 Keiko Sei | Solidity in Flux: Video Installation, Media Art and Media Landscape in Eastern Europe during the Transition | 93 Supporters: Miklós Peternák | Post-Video: Footnotes to the Transformation of Hungarian Videomaking | 105 Tomáš Pospiszyl | Live Coverage of the Past: National and Personal History through New Media | 117 National Cultural Culture Programme C‰lin Dan | Media Arts Get Media Free: A Small Anthology of Older Views | 127 Fund (of Hungary) of the Sofia Municipality Katarína Rusnáková | The Visual Representation of Gender and Sexual Identities in the New Media in Slovakia | 137 This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be Ryszard W. Kluszczy◊ski | Video Art in Poland | 147 made of the information contained therein. Boryana Rossa | Entertainment, Propaganda, Experiment: The Technological This volume has been produced by ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange and Social Foundations of Creative Work Using Video Technology | 153 ACAX operates in the framework of Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest Antonio Geusa | Video, the Purposeful Outsider: A Critical Examination of the Copy-editing | Adèle Eisenstein History of Video Art in Russia | 171 Konstantin Bokhorov | Performance and Video in Contemporary Russian Art | 185 Proofreading | Karina Horitz Ruben Arevshatyan | Glorious Futilities | 193 Editorial assistance | Réka Deim Mihnea Mircan | Monuments to Nothing | 199 Layout | Károly Királyfalvi Edit András | The Future is Behind Us: Flashbacks to the Socialist Past | 209 © Authors, editor 2009 | English translation © Mark Bossanyi, Alexandra Litvina, Daniel Morgan, Jim Tucker, 2009 | Where not noted, translations have been previously published. Photos © Annet Gelink Gallery (Amsterdam), Foksal Gallery Foundation (Warsaw) and the artists Transitland Video Archive Publisher’s Preface Project Director’s Introduction to the Project and Acknowledgements | 225 Kathy Rae Huffman: Video Art from Central and Eastern Europe in the Transitland Video Archive | 229 In the past few decades, video has become one of the most important artistic means of documenting social and political change. The Transitland project has Videography | 245 produced the most comprehensive collection to date of video from the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Transitland is an archive of video art, a wide-ranging selection that offers an insight into the history and typology of the genre, a Appendix collection of artworks that register the transformation of the former Socialist countries, including the personal and social aspects of the transition. Contributors | 299 Selected Bibliography | 305 The Transitland project is the result of an exemplary international cooperation between ACAX | Agency for Contemporary Art Exchange, hosted by the Ludwig Index of Artists and Authors | 311 Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art Budapest, InterSpace Association of Sofia, transmediale—festival for art and digital culture berlin. The project has been supported by Culture 2007–2013 Programme of the European Commission, Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe, the European Cultural Foundation, the Culture Programme of the Sofia Municipality and the National Cultural Fund (of Hungary). I would like to use this opportunity to thank all the institutions and individuals who have participated in the project, sharing their profound knowledge of the field with us. I wish to express my gratitude to all the sponsors who made it possible to realise the archive and the accompanying publication. The Ludwig Museum is one of the few institutions in the region to concentrate on the acquisition and presentation of contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe. The Transitland project fits ideally to the mission of the museum to present and support art coming from the region. A touring video collection that can be presented anywhere and accessed easily, together with a reader of theoretical writings that discusses many facets of the subject, the present initiative is probably one of the most efficient means to this end. Incorporated in the structure of the museum, ACAX engages in many similar international projects striving to establish and maintain channels of effective and continuous professional exchange among the actors of the contemporary art scene in Hungary and abroad. The Ludwig Museum, as represented by its compact but operative unit ACAX, enthusiastically participated in this international collaboration, undertaking the task of producing the accompanying publication to the project. I am grateful to the small, but dedicated and competent team that produced this reader within an extremely short time. My special thanks go to Edit András, editor of this volume, for shaping this well-founded compilation. Barnabás Bencsik Director, Ludwig Museum—Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest 7 Editor’s Preface and Acknowledgements There are vast numbers of books on the market with a focal point on video art. The scope of such surveys concentrates mostly on the geographical span of Western Europe and the United States, though the geopolitical field is rarely designated. Relatively little attention has been given to parallel practices in Central and Eastern Europe, especially not in reference books and volumes that are distributed outside the region.1 The aim of the present collection of essays is to counter this lack of visibility of Central and Eastern European video art, thus to extend geopolitically beyond the Western European and American context, focusing particularly on the New Europe (as the territory has come to be called nowadays), once called the East Bloc (or Soviet sphere behind the Iron Curtain). The New Europe is not our preferred category, as it once again divides Europe, separating the disintegrated region by drawing a distinction between Western and Eastern Europe, the former still considered (the real) “Europe”. In further dividing the region in our title, however, one might also detect a hidden political agenda. It would probably be more appropriate to call the territory under contemplation the post-Socialist European countries, as the scope of this volume does not cover the post-Socialist Asia, nor does it include countries from the geographical region with no Socialist past. Despite our awareness of the problematic nature of this seemingly neutral geographical categorisation, and the heated debate connected to the issue,2 for practical reasons the volume employs the same terminology applied by the Transitland archival project it accompanies. Concerning the time frame, although there are some references to the premature prehistory of the genre, the core of the book focuses on the last 20 years, on the period of turbulent and incredible political, economical and cultural changes in the region. Transition and transformation are the two keywords for the volume, as the book, similarly to the archival project, focuses on videos that, in one way or another, reflect on the metamorphoses of the formerly conceived homogeneous grey zone of Europe, and on the complete rearrangement of various courses of life of these societies. In the same way as the Transitland archival project, the book also concentrates strictly on video art, i.e., video films presented or screened within an art and exhibition context. It can be noted that video art in the region gradually broke out from the ghetto of experimental digital art, electronic art or media art, whatever its name, and became involved in the broader activity of local 9 art scenes. The number of video installations and museum screenings has Keiko Sei, Miklós Peternák, Boryana Rossa and Edit András. The other essays dramatically increased all over the region in the last ten years. One can witness were carefully researched and selected on the basis of how they reflect and a boom in the use of video technology even by artists with totally different resonate on our framework. They have already been published in art journals, backgrounds, education and training, which was not really the case in the early anthologies or catalogues, mostly in hardly accessible