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ZKM Presents Part 2 of Exhibition Dedicated to the History of German Video Art

“RECORD > AGAIN! – 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2” is dedicated to the history of German video art from its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s through to the early twenty-first century. Shown will be numerous discoveries, unavailable for viewing for decades. Many tapes had to be laboriously restored in the ZKM Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems in order to make them at all playable. Another special feature will be the presentation of the material on screens from each video’s original era.

“RECORD > AGAIN!” presents about fifty videos from the past forty years that exemplarily reflect the diversity of the German video scene. Shown, for example, will be the famous boxing match that Joseph Beuys fought at the documenta 5 in 1972 the reconstruction of the work Schafe by Wolf Kahlen, shown on six monitors, which was last screened in 1976; early video synthesizer works by Walter Schröder-Limmer; Medienhaus by HA Schult from 1978; a virtually unknown work by Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch from 1977; and an installation with a Gretchen-Dutschke interview by Michaela Buescher and Gerd Conradt, expanded with current material.

Several works, providing evidence that videos were also produced in East Germany, present an art historical sensation. For example, the exhibition will include a small film document, showing a half-inch video device with which an art performance by Michael Morgner was recorded in East Germany in 1981. The video tapes themselves, however, remain missing. Also screened will be the video action “Achtung Kamera,” that Wolf Kahlen carried out together with A.R. Penck in 1980 in East Berlin, the reconstruction of a video object by Jörg Herold from 1988, and the tape Herakles, that Lutz Dammbeck produced in East Germany in 1984...
Read entire article at Artdaily.org