22 April 2010

The festival – opened on 10 April 2010 – is running since some time and will be closed on 25 April. Juxtaposing the contemporary often controverse language of the “moving images” with an architecture striving for perfect harmony has a kind of magic charm, which has the potential to bring video as an art medium closer to a wider audience, separated from all day life which is overwhelmed by moving images in TV, cinema, advertising and Internet. It is only a pity that such initiatives have mostly not the financial potential to survive more than several seasons.

For Wilfried was portraying himself always the possibility to experiment with a human model and its identity, already at the early phase when he started being creative as a child. While investigating during his life for the message an artist wanted to communicate with the viewer (audience), he found out those artists who were portraying themselves, not all artists like to be confronted with themselves, however, had the most artistic depth, and even artists in the 2nd row with less artistic potential created often excellent self-portraits. The artist self-portrait is representing an exciting topic.

Nowadays, people do nothing else than overwhelming the living context with their “selfies” by using the camera of their mobile, superficial shots of mainly statistic value.
The portrait and even selfportrait was from the beginning of art creation also propaganda – staging oneself – to create an image how people would like other people to perceive them, but the way how people use their self-presentation as propaganda is often telling more about the personality. How about the artists using video- and moving images as medium for self-representing?
VideoChannel is anwering these and other conceptual questions via the 25 first works of a the series of 100 artists self-portraits, showing a diversity of different approaches giving partially exiting insights in otherwise hidden internal worlds.