November 29, 2011
It is our great pleasure to announce that after seven years as a traveling project, e-flux video rental (EVR) has found its permanent home at Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana. Donated to the museum’s collection and housed in Moderna Galerija’s new building at Metelkova Street, EVR has been open to the public since Saturday, November 26, 2011.
Conceived by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda in 2004 as a video rental shop that operates for free, EVR is a project proposing an alternative means of distributing and circulating video art. In spite of the fact that many artists of the 1960s and 70s were drawn to working with video because it was relatively inexpensive and easy to reproduce and distribute, the subsequent assimilation of video art into the precious-object economy of the art market has significantly limited access to video works.
EVR began as a functional reflection and inversion of this process. Comprising a public screening room, a film and video archive that grew with each installation of EVR, and a free video rental shop, VHS tapes can be watched in the space or checked out and taken home once a viewer has completed a membership form.
Since its original presentation at a storefront at 53 Ludlow Street in New York in 2004, EVR has traveled to venues in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Seoul, Paris, Istanbul, Canary Islands, Austin, Cali, Budapest, Boston, Antwerp, Miami, Lisbon, Lyon, and Rome. Each time EVR was presented in a new city, local artists, curators, writers, and art historians were invited to select works to be added to the collection. Over the years, this resulted in a collection of nearly 1000 works of film and video art by more than 600 artists and artists’ collectives from all parts of the world.
EVR’s permanent home at Moderna Galerija in a reconstruction of the original storefront at 53 Ludlow reminds us that the project began at a time when video technology was beginning to undergo a change from VHS to DVD as the dominant format. Video rental stores, which were a staple of everyday life in most parts of the world only a few years ago, have nearly vanished by now. As a video rental store entering a museum collection, EVR will preserve and make available for future study not only the videos that comprise it, but also the social form of video rental stores, and the technology that originally made it possible.
We would like to deeply thank all of the artists, selectors and art spaces, who contributed to developing EVR and hosted it during that past years.
Schedule
March 6-8, 2012
10am-12pm
November Paynter
1. Can Altay, Minibar
2. Can Altay, Papermen
3. Osman Bozkurt, Auto-Park
4. Christian Grou & Tapio Snellman, Clustered In
5. Solmaz Shahbazi & Tirdad Zolghadr, Excerpts from Tehran 1380
12-2pm
Esra Sarigedik
1. Nasan Tur, Run
2. Tintin Wulia, Everything’s OK
3. Camila Rocha, Morcegos-Bats
2-4pm
Christine Tohme & Mai Abu Eldahab
1. The Atlas Group/Walid Raad, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (17&31)
2. The Atlas Group, Miraculous Beginnings–No, Illness is Neither Here Nor There
3. The Atlas Group, I Only Wish That I Could Weep
4-6pm
Osman Bozkurt
1. Cynthia Madansky, Still Life
2. Cynthia Madansky, The PSA Project no. 1-15
3. Nevin Aladag, Voice Over
March 8-11, 2012
10am-12pm
Adam Klimczak
1. Józef Robakowski, From My Window
2. Józef Robakowski, I Was a Boy in New York
3. Józef Robakowski, My Videomasochisms
4. Józef Robakowski, Mechanical Cameraman
5. Józef Robakowski, Mechanical Cameraman and Marta
12-4pm
Heejin Kim (2 Discs)
Disc 1
1. Driton Hajredini, Somewhere in Prishtina
2. Hubert Czerepok, Do You Know Anything About Polish Art?
3. Jakup Ferri, An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist (Mladen Stillinovic)
4. Jakup Ferri, Jakup, Come Back
5. Sharon Hayes, Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screed #16
6. Tova Mozard, Westwood Los Angeles
Disc 2
7. Clemens Von Wedemeyer, Occupation
8. Mircea Cantor, The Landscape is Changing
9. A.L. Steiner, A Bunch of Assholes
10. Dmitry Gutov & Radek group, Demonstration
11. Love Nordberg, Trial and Error-All You Need is Love
12. Viatcheslav (Slava) Mizin / Alexander (Sasha) Shaburov, Two Against the Russian Mafia
4-6pm
Hubert Czerepok
1. Hubert Czerepok, Do You Know Anything About Polish Art?
For further information, contact Adela Železnik, adela.zeleznik [at] mg-lj.si, tel. +386 1 2416808.