Video art celebrating its 50th year in world

ISTANBUL - Anatolia News Agency

Misdeed’ by Recep Akar (R) describes the period around 1972 in Turkey and was inspired by a poem by Can Yücel. AA Photos

Turkish artist Recep Akar will be presenting his video art project “100x100=900 (100 video-artists to tell a century),” in a celebration of 50 years of video art by focusing on 100 years of history. Organized by Magmart, the aim is to celebrate the first creation of video art, which was started with Nam June Paik’s first screening of video art in Germany.

The world premiere of the event will take place in Rome, and will feature more than 40 artists in the project from Germany, Argentina, China, Italy, United States, England, Brazil, Greece, Spain, Russia, Peru, Colombia, Iran, Albania, India, French, Romania, Armenia, Hungary and the Philippines.

Akar will be in the project with his work titled “Misdeed,” which is a single channel video. As a form of artistic expression, all motion and still pictures attract Akar’s attention. He has produced short films, documentaries and videos, presented at various international festivals and exhibitions. He has recently produced works mainly in the field of video art and is currently continuing his post-graduate degree in Cinema and Television.

Period around 1972

According to Akar, “Misdeed” describes the period around 1972, and was inspired by a poem of Can Yücel. “1972 was a very significant year. It was a very significant year in Turkish history. It was the aftermath of a coup d’etat. The aim of my video is to reflect the darkness of the era,” he said.

The idea base of the “100x100=900” project is that in order to evolve it is necessary to understand what of past must be archived for future generations. In this sense, the event contacted 100 video artists to interpret anyone a year of the past century, in an attempt to create a global narration of 1900s. Processing the past through the moving image (cinema, television, the Internet) is one of characterizing elements of 1900s. The event will gather 100 videos together, and throughout 2013 these videos will be shown in many different countries.

The aim is to show that video art is an art that has been intimately close to the languages of the contemporary world.

The project’s aim is to give absolute freedom to artists and enable them to focus only on their own work on a certain year. This will bring an unsettling re-alignment of our view of the 20th century.

“100x100=900” also calls on the artists to experiment with different contexts for their own production.

The aim is to show that the global vision of artwork determines a meta-layer reading of any artwork.

This is the first time that such a project has been tried, at least for video art, so it is an experiment in itself.

At the end of project, the curator will publish the work in a catalogue. The intention is to cut a closed number of young art critics in this publication, preferably of different geographical and cultural origin.