Video Grabs

Bischoff,who first curated the works for Loop,Barcelona’s famous video art festival,in 2008,surprised the audience by dumbing down the newness of the medium. “Video art is considered new but it is not. The first video show was organised in 1961 in a German gallery. It progressed with the advent of television and music cassettes. Today,however,everybody who walks the streets with a cell phone is a video artist,” he said. Bischoff opened his Galerie Bernhard Bischoff and Partner in 2002 and since then has been organising video evenings in a snazzy Zurich disco,bringing about a video culture in Switzerland.

The evening began with Com&Com (Side by Side),a music clip with artists Johannes M. Hedinger and Marcus Gossolt posing as flashy Formula One players,wielding the mike high in the air as bikini-clad women wash the cars in the background. They croon in craggy voices,using a segment of the Swiss national song,and in the end are laid in coffins as a staid old man laments their death. The 2002 video spoofs the Hollywood video fad and even ended up on the Swiss national radio,much to the ire of the producers.

While Laurent Schmid’s Buzz,a 2008 video animation,is all about stellar constellations breaking into letters that form a word in the end,Reto Leibundgut’s 2007 film Wandstuck works with waste material — plastic sheets,old mattresses,wooden planks. When his landlord wants the studio empty,Leibundgut turns to music and nails everything — old photographs,wooden boards,sheets and cutouts — on the walls of the studio to crank out a structure. But it was artist Margot Zanni’s eerily silent Grosses Solo for Ahmed,a 2007 video animation,that awed the gathering with its amazing post-production work. A lively Cairo square turns silent as Zanni removes the cars and people save a man strolling down the pavement.

The films evoked a mixed response in the gathering. While artist Subba Ghosh pondered on the lack of socio-realistic content,professor Shukla Sawant spoke about the inventive use of the medium as opposed to documentation in India.