Video Essay Gallery

Filmexplorer's digital Gallery proposes several exhibitions of video-essays and focuses on their curation, with thematic perspectives and podcast discussions

The Gallery's Profile

Proposition and Curation

After a long period where definitory questions have prevailed, and a recent period of inclusion of a plurality of forms of video essay, the time is ripe to let aside the attitude of surveying or mapping the variegated landscape of video essays, and to let emerge the style of the author. This is a moment of taking position and a moment of discussion.  

A Dialogic Format with Podcasts

In this context, Filmexplorer's Video Essay Gallery support personal visions on the way of making a video essay, and give to experts the opportunity to discuss their own vision through the curation of a series of video essay and the production of a series of podcast discussions with thematic focuses.

The Collection

In each exhibition the curators select three video essays and propose one podcast discussion.

Filmexplorer's Video Essay Gallery is kindly supported by Ernst Göhner Stiftung

Three new exhibitions in 2024

After the five exhibitions curated by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto in 2022, Filmexplorer hosts three new curators for the 2024 exhibitions: Evelyn Kreutzer, Julian Ross and Volker Pantenburg, who discuss the following themes:

 

Who Owns an Image?

go to the exhibition and listen to the podcast

with video essays by Richard Misek, Maryam Jafri, Hartmut Bitomsky

23/9-20/10/2024

 

How to Measure the World

go to the exhibition and listen to the podcast

with video essays by Johannes Binotto, Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner, Occitane Lacurie

28/10-24/11/2024

 

Unwatchable

go to the exhibition and listen to the podcast

with video essays by belit sağ, Franzis Kabisch, Arthur Chopin

2-29/12/2024

The three curators of the 2024 Video Essay Gallery

Credits Photos Julian Ross: Merel Hegenbart Photography

About the curators

Evelyn Kreutzer is postdoctoral researcher, video essayist, and curator at Università della svizzera italiana. She's interested in questions of audiovisual memory and archivization, feminist media, questions of canonicity, taste, and cultural hierarchies, as well as screen music and sound. Her written and videographic work has been published in journals like NECSUSMusic, Sound, and the Moving Image[in]Transition, and The Cine-Files. With Kevin B. Lee and Johannes Binotto she currently co-leads the SNSF-funded research group "The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies" in Lugano and Lucerne, Switzerland. Her videographic monograph Televising Taste is forthcoming with Lever Press.

Evelyn Kreutzer's website

Julian Ross is Head of Film Programming & Distribution at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. In 2024, he was co-programmer of Doc Fortnight 2024 at The Museum of Modern Art, co-programmer of the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar at Thai Film Archive, co-curator of the group exhibition Community of Images at the Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, and a member of the selection committee at Villa Medici Film Festival.

Julian Ross' website

Volker Pantenburg is professor for Film Studies at the University of Zurich, where he directs the SNSF project «Paranational Cinema. Legacies and Practices» (2024 to 2027). He has published on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema, and contemporary moving image installations. His forthcoming book is Einfachheit ohne Vereinfachung. Zur Praxis Harun Farockis (2024). Book publications in English include Bernard Eisenschitz: Starting Places. A Conversation with Robert Kramer (2024, Editor) Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory (2015), Cinematographic Objects. Things and Operations (2015, Editor) and Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Co-Editor). In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut, a platform for researching Farocki’s visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present and the future of image cultures.

In the context of his work with Farocki’s estate, he occasionally employs (very minimal) videographic tools, see AUVICO – A Failed Attempt at Initiating Film Literacy in 1970 (2023) or Histories of Labor – Histories of Vision (2021). Together with others, he investigated the pre-history of videographic work in TV, Education, and experimental cinema in the project Kunst der Vermittlung – Aus den Archiven des Filmvermittelnden Films (2008/2009). More on public television and audiovisual essays can be found in a dossier compiled for NECSUS (Autumn 2017): Introduction, Fritz Lang (1974), Harun Farocki on Basil Wright (1975), Rainer Gansera on Peter Nestler (1975).

Open Access books:
Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory
Aggregatzustände Bewegter Bilder

Curators and themes of the 2022 Video Essay Gallery

She is a French researcher and filmmaker, currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lucerne School of Art and Design – HSLU. Galibert-Laîné’s work explores the intersections between cinema and online media, and addresses questions related to modes of spectatorship, gestures of appropriation, processes of knowledge production and mediated memory. She frequently teaches theory classes and artistic workshops about film and media, recently at CalArts (US), Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Marseille (FR), Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (NL) and Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (DE). Her films have shown at festivals such as the IFFRotterdam (NL), FIDMarseille (FR), Ji.hlava DFF (CZ), True/False Festival (US), transmediale (DE), Ars Electronica Festival (AT), WRO Media Art Biennale (PL) and Solothurner Filmtage (CH).

Chloé's Website

Theme of the curated choice for Filmexplorer's 2022 Video Essay Gallery:
DIGITAL FATIGUE, MEDIATED DREAMS

To me watching video essays has always been a way of engaging intimately with the spectatorial experiences of other people. By observing how a creator re-edits existing images I get a sense of what these images mean to them. I discover how that particular film or piece of media infiltrated their inner life, as an inexplicable object of fascination or repulsion, as a theoretical conundrum demanding a resolution, as a somewhat tangible remnant of the past version of themselves who encountered it for the first time...

Seeing signs of exhaustion everywhere I look today – in our relationship to media, to politics, to work and leisure, to one another – I have looked for video essays that explore how audio-visual media can in turn feed into, offer representations of and sometimes perhaps soothe our collective state of unrest. I did so with two intuitions which I hope this curation will allow to discuss: that this fatigue needs to be addressed as a political system rather than an individual condition and that the stuff that dreams are made of – whether they happen in our psyches or on our screens – brims with unexpected clues for helping us make sense of our weariness.

He is a filmmaker, media artist, and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media, which have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, as well as websites such as Mubi and Hyperallergic. He is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI).

His award-winning Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound. In 2016 the Austrian Filmmuseum programmed a retrospective of his video essays. His short Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox received the most mentions in the 2020 Sight & Sound video essay poll.

Through Bottled Songs, his collaborative project with Chloé Galibert-Laîné, he was awarded the 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grant, the 2018 European Media Artist Platform Residency, and the 2019 Eurimages Lab Project Award at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

He was 2017 Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. In 2019 he produced Learning Farocki, a series of video essays on Harun Farocki, commissioned by the Goethe Institut. In 2020 he co-curated the Black Lives Matter Video Essay Playlist with Will DiGravio and Cydnii Wilde Harris.

He was Founding Editor and Chief Video Essayist at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at
 Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Sight & Sound, Texte zur Kunst, Slate and Indiewire.

Kevin's Website

Theme of the curated choice for Filmexplorer's 2022 Video Essay Gallery:
UN-VISIBLE TRACES

 

The video essay has become such a powerful format for audio-visual rhetoric and expression, situated within a cultural moment in which social media puts overwhelming emphasis on self-exhibition. Visibility functions as rhetorical power. If the video essay is meant to produce critical awareness of audio-visual forms, how can it understand the ethical dimensions of such power, one which implicates the video essay itself?

To put it more bluntly: in being fixated on the power of the visual, what do video essays render invisible? Are the things worth seeing the things that cannot be seen? Is, therefore, the significant work of a video essay not merely about making things visible, but un-visible?

The five works I have selected create, each in their own way, a heightened sensitivity of the non-visible. They reflect lives whose experiences and inner realities can’t match the regimes of representation enforced by state policies, visual technologies or film and media genres. They propose a new set of strategies and audio-visual relationships to reflect upon realms of living, feeling and meaning that extend beyond merely seeing. The significant presence they leave is not in an image but in a lasting trace.

He is researcher and senior lecturer in cultural and media studies at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and at the English Department of the University of Zurich. He is a regular contributor to the film magazine Filmbulletin, curator, experimental filmmaker and video essayist. He is currently working on a study on film technology and its relations to the psychoanalytical unconscious. And since 2021 he is leading the research project “VideoEssay. Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching” (videoessayresearch.org) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Johannes' Website

Theme of the curated choice for Filmexplorer's 2022 Video Essay Gallery:
EXPERIMENT, EMBODIMENT, ACCIDENT. VIDEO ESSAYS AS LABORATORIES

While video essays are often understood as an explanatory representational format with which to argue an authorised knowledge about audio-visual objects in a more fitting form I am interested in videographic practice as experimental research which is open to the accidental. The video essays I am most inspired and stimulated by are not necessarily the ones that present an argument most convincingly but rather those pieces that are entering a zone of uncertainty, of doubt and risk. Video essays that put our traditional understandings of expertise into question and instead position us as what the philosopher Jacques Rancière called “emancipated spectators” – not pupils but fellow explorers.

The exhibitions of Filmexplorer's Video Essay Gallery

In the exhibition spaces here below you find all the material, curatorial texts and the

podcast discussions with the curators

of the 2022 and 2024 Video Essay Gallery