Anne Diestelkamp
cultural programmer, artistic researcher/ editor and translator
Conversation in three chapters
Philipp Guffler, Ana María Millán, Marcel Odenbach und Yan Wai Yin
Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany
As part of VIDEONALE.20 – Festival for video and time-based arts
2025
Since the emergence of video art in the 1960s, artists have used the medium of video as a means of critically addressing power structures — using artistic strategies that are subversive, resistant, and resilient in the face of the oppression of people and their diversity. Many of the works presented at VIDEONALE.20 explore the social, political, and ecological forces to which human and non-human subjects are involuntarily exposed, and how they endure them. The medium of video thus becomes an instrument of revelation and preservation — but also of world-making — and in doing so becomes itself an expression of resilience.
In three discussion rounds, VIDEONALE.20 artists talk about the phenomenon of endurance in their work.
Chapter 1: Marcel Odenbach and Yan Wai Yin in conversation with Kathrin Jentjens
Ständig auf dem Sprung sein (Constantly on the Move) by Marcel Odenbach and Muted Bridges by Yan Wai Yin address the consequences of authoritarian systems that lead to migration or silence. In a collage of produced and found footage, Odenbach explores the phenomenon of (forced) departure and perpetual movement. In a diary-like video documentation, Yan Wai Yin indirectly preserves the 2019/20 protest movement in Hong Kong against China’s political influence.
Chapter 2: Philipp Gufler in conversation with Kat Lawinia Gorska
A jet of water is aimed at the heart area of a naked body that stands firm: in The Beginning of Identification, and its End, Philipp Gufler uses historical footage and staged moving images to explore the successful history of emancipation for gender diversity and the visibility of queer bodies. He contrasts this with contemporary homonationalism and its instrumentalization of LGBTQ+ emancipation movements for anti-Muslim racism and exclusion.
Chapter 3: Ana María Millán and Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez
In her work, Ana María Millán deals with the exploitation of resources and its impact on the ecosystem. In Desert — a combination of computer simulation and video game — players move from the mining areas near Cali, Colombia, into a barren desert coated in oil, eventually beginning to immerse themselves in it. In her conversation with curator Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Millán discusses the potential of gaming as a power-critical tool for creating worlds.
📷 Jo Hempel