VIDEONALE.scope is an annual film series of the Videonale Bonn at the interface between experimental film, video and performance art.

This year’s edition of VIDEONALE.scope was dedicated to the body as a subject of filmic narrations and experiments. Works from the 1960s to the present were presented that deal with the human body, its collective extensions and more-than-human coexistences.

We are increasingly experiencing our bodies as vague – as psychophysical structures that are being technologically and economically tapped in ever more far-reaching ways, that have to endure growing social and political tensions, but that also diversely proliferate, making a multitude of possible identities and constellations conceivable and real. How does this body behave toward itself and other bodies? What notions of desirable and undesirable bodies, but also of new alliances can emerge? How can bodies be mobilized as sites of collectivity, decentralization and resistance, as “anti-bodies” directed against their increasing control and commodification?

The heroic body experiments and narcissistic self-explorations of earlier generations of artists can hardly provide new insights in a present in which the body is experienced foremost as fragile and fluid. The selected films instead take the path of treating one’s own bodily experiences and those of others, their representability and political implications, in an observing, questioning and performative manner.

They create multiple, opaque, deceptive surfaces to make the legibility and exploitability of bodies more difficult, or they work with doubles and avatars navigating the gaps between individual and collective, history and the present, nature and technology. They probe the limits of sensory perception and corporeal memory and elucidate old and new strategies of their manipulation and control. They explore the intimacy of observation and touch and show how the care for living and dead bodies articulates the blind spots of groups and communities. Not least, they describe how marginalized bodies become a stake in the value cycle of artistic work and demand new forms of social representation.

With contributions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marwa Arsanios, Sadie Benning, Anouk De Clercq, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Eli Cortiñas, Thirza Cuthand, Kevin J. Everson, Scott Fitzpatrick, Dora García, General Idea, Karissa Hahn, Ayesha Hameed, Barbara Hammer, Stefan Hayn, Adam Shingwak Khalil & Zack Khalil, Vika Kirchenbauer, Kristin Lucas, Nour Ouayda, Adrian Paci, Sondra Perry, Doug Porter, Seth Price, Yvonne Rainer, James Richards, Emily Wardill, Gernot Wieland, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, Akram Zaatari, Katarina Zdjelar and Aaron Zeghers & Lewis Bennett.

VIDEONALE.scope#8 was curated by Katrin Mund.

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