Rewind 1997

Curated by Noëlle Pia

If you grew up with video tapes, you will remember the two buttons "rewind" or "fast forward". So let's rewind about 20 years and take a look at video art in the Basel area in the mid and late 1990s.

Video creation has a high status in Basel, not least thanks to the pioneering work that led to the establishment of the first pure film and video class at a Swiss art academy in 1985 – against some resistance. Graduates of the first and second classes for audiovisual design have attracted a great deal of national and even international attention. But what about the following generation, which emerged in the 1990s? All the artists in the exhibition worked primarily with the medium of video back then, and many still do today. They were able to approach the medium with greater naturalness than the previous generations, who had to work even harder politically for its acceptance. In addition, access to the technology was easier (for example, thanks to the video cooperatives that had previously emerged). This more relaxed relationship with technology probably also led to it being perfected in all its varieties, or else it played no overriding role and served purely as a recording medium. The exhibition encompasses this range of approaches, but is also open to music videos and documentary works.

The artists thus appeared at a time when video art was becoming increasingly established outside of specialized festivals and institutions, but was also marked by the transition to digitalization, which was to completely change our relationship to the moving image. Video software was not yet part of every home computer. Distribution channels via digital networks also did not exist ten years before YouTube, or only to a very limited extent. A look at the video art of the mid-1990s makes us aware of these changes.