SUBORDINATED REALITY_ Open Call for video artists and filmmakers
Application Period: March-2 to May-25, 2020
Curator: Martin Calvino
Confirmed exhibition and screening places include:
Sep-12-2020 UG-Fest, Contemporary Art Centre Pispala, Tampere, Finland
Sep-21 to Sep-29-2020 VBKÖ, Vienna, Austria
May-7 to May-23-2021 ARS 108, Factory 108, Nokia, Finland
July-23 to July-24-2021 NEON KUNST, Berlin, Germany
Summer 2021 Videokanava Online Gallery
Presentation reward for the selected artists is 50 euros.
- Exhibition's poster created by Alberto Reza -
Videokanava is an organization founded in Finland in 2014 and formed by a group of contemporary artists based in the city of Tampere. It presents videos from international artists and filmmakers and organizes video art festivals on a yearly basis. Each year a different curator selects video works for a themed exhibition from videos submitted. This year the curator selected is Martin Calvino and the theme is Subordinated Reality as it relates to the causes of post-truth.
Curatorial Text by Martin Calvino_
Although objective reporting has been the gold standard of professional journalism, as we transition through an era of post-truth, disinformation campaigns and fake news, balanced reporting has the conflictive outcome of dedicating equal time to truth and to those responsible for spreading falsehoods as means to assert political dominance. When journalists and the media in general, in their strive for objectivity and balanced reporting, present side by side political and social actors that express their convictions untethered from reality and facts with those who fundament their thinking and actions based on pertinent information and facts generated by a network of trusted institutions, they inadvertently equalize falsehood to truth. Despite the importance of an independent and vibrant media to democracy, public trust in legacy media is at all time low. Concomitant with this is the rise of satire and comedy-politics fueled by a pervasive entertainment culture that has turned the news itself into a joke. As result, we are over-entertained and fact-deprived. Together with this, we are also immersed in a political context of hyper-partisanship that is amplified not only by geographic and cultural differences, but also through the echo chamber effects of social media. Without doubt, we are loosing our capacity of sharing a common reality, and we are increasingly looking at it with non-overlapping lenses. Post-truth is here, although it roots has long been in the making. Among them, the smuggling of intellectual and academic discourses on postmodernism and science and technology studies, first by corporations to seed doubt on the association of tobacco consumption and cancer, as well as the impact of human activities on the environment and climate change; and later by political conservatives and the alt-right to subordinate reality as valid mechanism to assert political dominance.
How then should we protect ourselves from misinformation and political manipulation? Video artists and filmmakers not only have the moral, intellectual and aesthetic sensibilities, but also the technical tools to explore the world of the moving image as means to help us answer this question. The open call for art presented here seeks artists addressing issues pertaining to the causes of post-truth, as well as its possible solutions. We look forward to receive all type of video works and short films on the following topics as they relate to post-truth:
Climate Change Denial
Distrust in Legacy Media
Media Manipulation of Public Opinion
Fake News
Satire and Comedy-Politics
Hyper-Partisanship
Eco Chamber Effects of Social Media
The Erosion of a Shared Reality
The Political Subordination of Reality
Postmodernism
Science and Technology Studies
Artists could approach the above topics from two viewpoints: (1) critical perspectives and/or (2) possible solutions.
Note: In Calvino's latest work, he used unsupervised machine learning algorithms to detect political ideology from newspaper articles written about political candidates running for president of Uruguay. This work provided the basis and fundamental knowledge in which the curatorial text proposed for Videokanava Exhibition was subsequently based. The mentioned work can be accessed at the following link:
SELECTED ARTISTS
On August-27-2020 the list of selected artists and confirmed venues was announced by Videokanava. From almost 100 works submitted, I selected 21 works created by artists from 15 countries:
Alberto Reza - System Failure, 2020, Finland / Mexico
Andrea Mikysková - Rigged Game, 2019, Czech Republic
Bransha Gautier - Gogyoshi - My Fukushima / Topics of the Day, 2018, Austria
Caspar de Gelmini -Objects and Cells 1, 2015-2020 / Objects and Cells 4, 2019, Germany
Citron Lunardi - Ave Caesar, 2019, Italy
Fernando Foglino - The Girl and the Dove, 2019-2020, Uruguay
Francesca Leoni and Davide Mastrangelo - Alzaia(S), 2019, Italy
Guli Silberstein - Cut Out, 2014, UK
Marko Lampisuo - National Landscape, 2019, Finland
Martin Groisman - UT(R)OPICAL, 2019, Brazil / Argentina
Pierre Ajavon - Forever Changes, 2019, France
Shir Handelsman - Miracles on the mountain, 2020, Israel / Recitative 2019, Israel
Silvia / Bogdan Amancei / Armanu - Life of a Tree, 2018, Romania
Silvia De Gennaro - This is not a Horror Movie, 2014, Italy
Sonia Giannetto - Episodio, 2017, Italy
Thomas Valianatos - Trumptard_Fake, News Dance, 2019, Greece
Vojislav Radovanovic - Suburbia Story, 2020, USA
Zoe Aiano - Černobílá / Black & White, 2019, Germany
- Exhibition's poster created by Alberto Reza -
Here is the brochure for the exhibition that took place at VBKÖ in Vienna, Austria during September of 2020: