Vidéo Femmes
Curated by Yucef Mehri

Vidéo Femmes is the first group encounter of Venezuelan women video artists. Most of the videos presented here are works created specially for this exhibition.

Vidéo Femmes attempts to expose an unexplored vision of Venezuelan video art practice, following the traces of three generations of women artists that have established a recognized and valued body of works.

Read full curatorial statement.

95% Iguales, by Nela Ochoa
2002
DVD, 1 min. 30 sec
The work presented by Nela Ochoa is part of a research about genetics that the artist has been doing since 1994. Her video, filmed in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, shows a ballet dancer in a tutu, spinning and shifting on tiptoes at a Tudor’s style house. The image of the performer and the image of a pink pig wearing a tulle is juxtaposed from the toes of the dancer and the pig’s feet, merging the features of both characters. At the end of Ochoa’s video appears a statistical sentence printing on the screen "95% of porcine chromosomes correspond to human chromosomes."
View the video

Adentro-Afuera, by Nan Gonzáles
2002
VCR Tape, 3 min
Nan Gonzales reveals her concern for one of the most valued conditions of the human gender: freedom. She emulates on her video the presence of a running horse, captivated in a stall, surrounded by an atmosphere of uncertainty. Quoting the artist, "Adentro-Afuera (Inside-Outside) is a tribute to all the live beings that are suffering and have lost their autonomy in hands of man."
View the video

Make a Wish, by Conny Viera
2002
VCR Tape, 10 min
Make a Wish proposes the vision of a falling star that unpredictably appears a number of times over a photographic document. It includes the recreation and animation of a 3D nocturnal sky which has been integrated to the photographic surface on the video. The photographs and photomontage are mostly testimonies of the Great Depression in America during the 1930s.
Make a Wish establishes a transition between the two-dimensional surface and the 3D space, between the factual content and the illusionistic representation, introducing traces of a riotous reality while invoking the essence of chance in the middle of ever-shifting certainties.

 

So Won, by Diana López
2000
VCR Tape, 15 min
Childhood is a recurrent subject that has been present throughout the whole work of Diana López. In So Won (a Venezuelan jargon which means "What’s Up"), López recreates a shadow theater from a series of street fights between a group of kids, displaying the aggressive behavior of children, a premise that has been explored in films like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ based on the novel of William Golding.
The phenomenon of youth violence has been recurrent in Venezuelan film productions, not only because it’s a stereotype of poor classes, but also because it has been increasing on educated and wealthy social strata, as a result of large amount of media violence and the absence of parental support.

Interseption, by Odalys Valdivieso
2002
DVD, 5 min
This video represents the passion for the technical skill and rigor that remains on the nature of drawing. The images that take place on Interseption describe lines creating abstract compositions and industrial aberrations which are sublimated by pictures of radiant flowers. The work of Odalys Vadivieso demonstrates an interesting fusion among different creative tendencies, like industrial design, graphic design, and cinema, generating a language determined by urban and poetic elements.

Osmosis, by Alexadra Meijer-Werner
2001
VCR Tape, 3 min
Osmosis shows a video installation projecting images taken by Meijer-Werner, and from films and documentaries like Baraka, over a group of permeable membranes made by artist Kirstin Child Burke. Each membrane has a sculptural presence that absorbs the images projected and establishes a unique visual experience, reflecting the most universal subjects of human kind, such as birth, love, war, religion, freedom, death, etc.

@ MOCA at California Plaza
Nov. 10, 11am -5pm,