VIDEO ART: REPLAY, PART 1.
ASKING NOT TELLING

September 11, 2009 - December 6, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10 @ 6-8 pm
Exhibition Walkthrough with curator Kate Kraczon:
Thursday, September 10 @ 5pm, ICA members only

ICA is pleased to present Video Art: Replay, a year-long, three-part exhibition offering a snapshot of current video art. On view September 11, 2009-August 1, 2010 in ICA's Project Space, this exhibition, centered around three themes prevalent in video art—documentary, animation, and comedy—will further focus the wide-ranging field of single-channel, projected video.

Part I: Asking Not Telling

This fall, Part I presents videos by artists who use the tropes of documentary filmmaking to capture, record, (re)record and represent cultural memory. Voice-over narration, found footage, and reenactments only confuse a sense of history. What really happened? These works ask rather than tell. They both assume and play with viewers’ knowledge of topics ranging from film and television to politics, art history, and sci-fi fantasy. Throughout, the documentary’s hold on authoritative truth comes evocatively untethered.

Part II

Part II (January 15-March 21, 2010) consists of ten projected single-channel video works that employ modes of animation or are in dialogue with the techniques and formal qualities of animation. Typically, the consideration of animation techniques conjures fantastical notions of the "make-believe." This exhibition will push against these assumptions, taking a closer look at some recent video works that inherently contend with cultural activity on the level of "the everyday," engaging with the production of the imaginary as a social practice.

Part III

Part III (April 23-August 1, 2010) focuses on notions of the absurd, and acting out. Included videos use jokes (often dark ones), fantastical narratives, the absurd, slapstick, fruitless stances, dress-up and disguise, and other comedic devices to deliver an unusually high degree of laughter (both joyful and nervous).

This exhibition is curated by Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator Kate Kraczon, and Curator Jenelle Porter, and is accompanied by a brochure publication.

ICA acknowledges support from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation, Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania. ( as of 7/22/09)

Images, top to bottom: Jim Finn, Interkosmos, 2006. Courtesy of the artist... Mario Garcia Torres, A Brief History of Jimmie Johnson's Legacy, 2006; video, colour, sound; 5 min. 45 sec., looped. Courtesy of the artist