BÒLIT - LA RAMBLA
TONI SERRA - Itishara Archives
A video-installation/archive giving access to a selection of documents and videos made and compiled between 1994 and 2007. Each screen of the 3-channel projection presents a series of visions that coincide, collide or evoke poetic, intangible associations. On the central screen, poems and small documentaries revolve around the world of dreams and everyday life, in a vision of the ephemeral, within a context of cities and landscapes from the Islamic world. On the side screens, there are images of conflict with this culture, as seen from two different standpoints: military videogames set in the Arab world on the one hand contrast with post-Gulf War victory parades on the other. Itishara Archives invites us to reflect, beyond the cultural and political conflict, on this dialogue of extremes. This is a reflection on the reality and unreality of daily life, on enlightening inner vision and its contrast with stereotypes and shock propaganda. The project won the prestigious Nam June Paik award in 2006.
Toni Serra
Toni Serra is the author of texts, videos, interactive and other sub-media projects. Founder member of OVNI (Unidentified Video Observatory) archive and OVNI programmer and researcher since 1993.
Serra has explored different visions through his videos, a no man's land between documentary and poetry with the constant presence of the notion of "trance" and the realities of dreams. His first works, filmed in Barcelona, New York and Tangiers, raised questions on beauty, on the mystery of the ephemeral and the marginal. In 1994, back in Barcelona, he started the TV Code video series, a personal criticism of the alienating mechanisms of the mass media, in which he seeks to parody its spectacular power of seduction and to deconstruct its hypnotic ability to create social models and identitarian stereotypes. He came to understand criticism as a tool for making things appear and for discovering other worlds. This in turn led him to reflect and experiment on how video relates to the visionary, to our inner experience and to visions that move through worlds, spaces and times, through the real and the unreal, through dreaming and wakefulness, through poetry and prophecy ... like a ship that erases the borders and limits across which it sails. This is the underlying idea behind the Hamdulillah Tapes and Dream Archives series, a work in progress since 1998 when the artist began to alternate his residence between Barcelona and the Moroccan city of Duar Msuar.
BÒLIT - SANT NICOLAU
BILL VIOLA - The Messenger
The Messenger is a video-installation which was created in 1996 as a commission for a large-scale video-projection for Durham Cathedral in the north of England. A naked male figure gradually emerges from water, takes a deep, resounding breath of air, and then slowly submerges back again into the water. The sacred, contemplative atmosphere of medieval architecture emphasises the ethereal aspect of the images. Viola's recurrent theme of the spiritual and physical circuit of birth, life and death now becomes a personal vision, containing the clarity of an aura.
Bill Viola
Bill Viola is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the world of video art and has gained international acclaim as one of the major artists in this genre.
He has played an important role in the institutionalisation of video as a major form of contemporary art and, by doing so, has contributed to the broadening of its scope in terms of technology, content and historical dimension. For over 35 years, Viola has produced video creations, architectural video-installations, sound landscapes, electronic music performances, plasma screen video compositions, and works for television. His video installations -total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound- employ sophisticated state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world and can be found in many major public and private collections. Viola's single-channel videotapes have been distributed in cinemas and broadcast around the world, while his writings have been widely published and translated into many languages.
Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on the universal human experiences of birth, death and the unfolding of consciousness. They have roots in eastern and western art as well as in the spiritual traditions of Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. Viola's use of the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memory in his videos reaches out to a wide audience and inspires a direct, personal response to his art.