Video Art Biennials

International video art biennials arrived at the MAMM in 1986, the same year its iconic cinema opened. This pioneering initiative in Colombia ran until 1992 with four successive editions: 1986, 1988, 1990, and 1992. The immediate precursors to these biennials were the Canadian Video Art Exhibition (1984) and the Experimental and Computer Video Art Exhibition, curated by the American artist John Orentlicher in 1985. Orentlicher himself would later serve as a juror for the Museum’s biennials.

The first MAMM International Video Art Biennial (1986) featured more than 200 works by artists from 12 countries, a significant number considering the state of the local and national art scene: only in the late 1970s had some Colombian artists begun experimenting with this “new technique.”

According to Argentine critic Jorge Glusberg, who participated in the first biennial and also in the First Latin American Colloquium on Non-Objective and Urban Art, video art is a tool that, through experimentation, allows for the liberation from traditional systems of representation. This, in addition to its pedagogical function, would also help to shift the idea of ​​video as a strategy exclusive to mass media, making it suitable for presentation within the art world. This first biennial featured works by Nam June Paik, Marina Abramović and Ulay, and Ingo Gunther.

While the second biennial saw an increase in the participation of international artists and the production of video art in the country, the third and fourth departed from the conceptual focus of the first two events; the inclusion of commercial videos and documentaries significantly lowered the overall quality. This, coupled with social and political issues, brought an end to one of the first projects aimed at showcasing digital and experimental practices in the country. At that same time, the production, exhibition, and criticism of video art were gaining traction within museum circuits worldwide.

The importance of these biennials lay in the opportunity they provided to discuss video as an experimental practice within the visual arts at a national level. As was customary in the Museum’s exhibition projects, these were accompanied by an academic program that expanded the critical and reflective content of the exhibitions. In the case of the international video art biennials, noteworthy examples include the workshops led by Jeremy Welsh, John Orentlicher, and Ulrike Rosenbach, and the seminar “Video Art and Communication” held in 1990, as part of the third biennial. With this series of events, the MAMM was fulfilling one of the core principles of contemporary museums: to serve as a platform for discussion and ongoing exploration of artistic issues, a constant in the parallel work of its education and cultural programs.

*The German Videonale, one of the oldest video art festivals in Europe, had begun two years earlier.