Issue #813 (78), Friday, October 18, 2002

CULTURE

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Video-Art Party-Festival Breaks the Mold

By Aliona Bocharova

Special to The St. Petersburg Times

For The St. Petersburg Times

Jana Alakoskela and Sami Heikkila's "Kekkonen" ("The President") is one of the films that will be showing on Saturday.

Feature films and documentaries have long been a part of local movie-goers' and art-lovers' cultural menu, yet video art, an eclectic artistic mix, remains largely an exception.

For this reason, BLICK, a project to screen "new Nordic films and videos" that takes place at Mirage cinema on Saturday, is being promoted in a party format. The screenings, accompanied by Scandinavian easy-listening music played by local DJs, begin at midnight and run until 4 a.m.

BLICK started in Sweden in 1999 and aimed to bring together the most recent films and videos created by young artists from across Scandinavia. After a lengthy selection process, undertaken in 2001 and superintended by curators from Stockholm's Modern Museum and Helsinki's Nordic Institute of Contemporary Art, or NIFCA, 40 works were shown to Scandinavian audiences. The first screenings took place at NIFCA and the Modern Museum last October.

"The response was quite positive, and proved a firm interest in video art in the Nordic countries," says Thomas Heikkela, the project manager for cultural affairs at the information bureau of the Nordic Council of Ministers.

BLICK consists of nearly 50 films and videos by 40 artists from Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. On display is a mix of works that vary in format and duration, and give an overview of current trends on the Nordic arts scene.

Although, as Heikkela says, "it is hard to name the topics in the works presented," a few general trends can still be traced. Although narrative is still the most common technique employed, it often carries a hint of an "authentic" documentary, or resembles a home video. New artists tend to focus on structures or models, whether aesthetic or social.

For example, "Power," by Finnish artist Salla Tykka, is a study of gender roles, as seen in her parents' relationship, and articulated through a four-minute boxing match between a man and a woman. In "Friedrich Passage," Swedish artist and composer Tobias Bernstrup offers a short animation inspired by the acclaimed computer game "Half Life." The audience, as the "hero" of the game, is not yet aware of its mission: it moves forward and finds itself in a huge shopping center; all the stores are closed, there are no people around, and only the escalators are still working.

BLICK has been on an international tour, with screenings in over 40 countries, including Germany, Norway and Slovenia. This weekend's event in St. Petersburg is not the project's first time in Russia; BLICK traveled to Kaliningrad earlier this year, but met with a cool reception, even being described as "boring."

"Video art as such is not yet popular enough in Russia," says Dmitry Milkov, the deputy director of St. Petersburg's Pro Arte Institute, one of the project's organizers. "It might be quite hard even for a sophisticated Petersburg audience to appreciate a four-hour block of films and videos."

Pro Arte is already known for promoting contemporary visual culture in St. Petersburg. It organized "Black Box," an exhibition of British video art, last year, and, earlier this year, brought Shirin Neshat, the world-renowned Iranian-U.S. queen of video art, to the city in April.

It seems to have been a smart move on the part of the institute to turn a "boring" video-art presentation into a liberal, all-night party aimed at a general audience, rather than small-scale screenings for the arts "in crowd."

"I believe that Mirage is the ideal place for such projects," says Milkov. "Anyone interested in watching the videos can sit in the movie theater, but there is also a screen in the cafe downstairs where people can enjoy the films and socialize with friends.

According to Milkov, "If the project is successful, we plan to cooperate with the Mirage Cinema by presenting other projects to promote video art, one of the most perspective and dynamic trends in contemporary art."