VDB TV: Decades
Sandwiched Between Trauma and Apocalypse: history as it intersects with biography and the rewriting of the past
Paul Chan | Ximena Cuevas
Jesse McLean | Walid Raad | Steve Reinke
VDB TV: Decades
Sandwiched Between Trauma and Apocalypse:
history as it intersects with biography and the rewriting of the past
“By relating history to biography, we find ourselves snuggly positioned between trauma and apocalypse. It is between these two points that this program unfolds, each work radically reconfiguring this relationship between history and biography to make meaning of the present. These videos by Paul Chan, Ximena Cuevas, Jesse McLean, Steve Reinke, and Walid Raad propose subjective rewritings of historical events, claiming agency over how these pasts are understood. The works variously articulate the irreconcilability of worlds — we live together in alternate, yet parallel realities.”
— Aily Nash
Continue reading Aliy Nash’s essay Sandwiched Between Trauma and Apocalypse: history as it intersects with biography and the rewriting of the past
Aily Nash is a curator based in New York. She is co-curator of Projections, the New York Film Festival’s artists’ film and video section, and a Biennial advisor and co-curator of the film program for the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She is program advisor to the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Short Film section. She has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1, NYC; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC; Anthology Film Archives, NYC; FACT, Liverpool, UK; Image Forum, Tokyo, Japan; Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain; and others. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Artforum.com, Film Comment, and elsewhere. Nash curated five seasons of the Basilica Screenings series at Basilica Hudson (2012-2016). She has taught at Parsons and Bruce High Quality Foundation University in New York. In 2015, she was awarded a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
VDB TV: Decades, a five-part curated screening series exploring VDB’s unique archive, casts a distinctive eye over the development of video as an art form. This program is streamed for free on the VDB TV platform as part of Video Data Bank’s 40th Anniversary Celebrations.
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About VDB TV:
VDB TV is a rotating series of groundbreaking programs presenting essential video art, streaming free for the first time to the general public on the Video Data Bank website. From early media pioneers, to sensational contemporary artists, VDB TV provides unprecedented access to the culturally significant Video Data Bank archive of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB TV is curated by prominent programmers and moving image art specialists. To advance accessibility to the VDB collection, all programs included within VDB TV feature closed captions for the hearing impaired.
VDB TV is supported in part by a Media Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
