Video on Screen. The Early Years in Europe
27–29.11.2024
Tate Modern, London

Focusing on pioneering works produced in Europe (1960-1980), this two-day programme presents a selection of works made with synthesizers or intended for television, often first filmed on 16mm and subsequently transferred to video. With productions by artists such as Helena Almeida, Wendy Brown and Brian Hoey, Livinus and Jeep van de Bundt, Robert Cahen, Geneviève Calame, Sanja Iveković, Charlotte Johannesson, Pawel Kwiek, Ketty La Rocca, Dieter Meier, E. M. de Melo e Castro, Martial Raysse, Rúrí, Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Kerchbron, Aldo Tambellini and Otto Piene, VALIE EXPORT or Miha Vipotnik, the programme is co-curated by François Bovier and Stéphanie Serra with Valentine Umansky, Beatrice Garcia-Velasco and Valentina Ravaglia as an echo and extension to the exhibition Electric Dreams. Art and Technology before the Internet (28.11.24 – 01.06.25, Tate Modern, London).

Image and copyright: Rúrí, Rainbow 1983, video still. Courtesy the Artist.

The Emergence of Video Art in Europe (1960–1980): history, theory, sources and archives.

Project

To date, there is no European-wide history of video art. It is this gap that the present research programme proposes to fill. Firstly by gathering data on the artists, the works and the events that enabled the emergence of this new artistic practice in the 1960s, or that were important in its development in the following years in Europe, and by bringing to light specific national conditions of production and distribution.