Videoclub

Initiated in 2018, Video Club is a series of thematic screenings bringing together works from the Stedelijk’s single-channel video collection, launched in the Stedelijk’s Teijin auditorium with pizza and beer. After the last two editions of Video Club, On Humor and Sound Check, which were launched as eventless screenings in the Stedelijk’s permanent collection display, this new edition curated by artist Ahmet Öğüt will launch virtually via IDFA’s online cinema. Within his program, Öğüt responds to the forced domesticity and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the accompanying frustrations and emancipations of creative and political expression during this time. 

Read his curatorial statement below:

‟While listening Pipilotti Rist lip syncing Kevin Coyne’s Jacky and Edna from 1973; singing being stuck at home, lost and all alone, many of us face with such feelings during these pandemic times; feeling lonely in bigger towns and safer in smaller towns, staying busy with physical and mental exercises that may keep us alive. Lucia Nimcova takes us back to her hometown in Slovakia, where she asked older citizens to perform physical exercises they had to learn by heart under the communist regime. Are we living in times when personal exercises taking over political exercises, or perhaps nothing ever changed? 

We see a kind of similar simplicity which echoes the political complexity in Gloria Camiruaga’s Popsicles that was filmed at the height of Chile’s military dictatorship of Pinochet. What do we do when we lose the stability we thought we have? With The End of Photography Judy Fiskin tells us what was lost; no more photo paper, no more sync, no more water, no more trays, no more developer, no more print washer. What happens if we lose all our immediate tools, our apparatuses? We have been trying to learn from isolation during today’s pandemic times. Are we going to cancel life? postpone it? turn it into a complete virtual science fiction? When the TV was the internet of an era which is still there, General Idea created a television program; Test Tube exploring the artist's precarity. It was in fact important for General Idea to remain effective and subversive using the mechanisms of the mass media environment against itself. If the apparatuses of ideology are still around, there we are; keep reinventing our apparatuses of subversion during these unusual times.”

WORKS IN THIS VIDEO CLUB

Pipilotti Rist, You Called me Jacky, 4’08”

General Idea, Test Tube, 28’12”

Gloria Camiruaga, Popsicles, 4’49”

Judy Fiskin, The End of Photography, 2’30”

Lucia Nimcova, Exercise, 5’53”

ABOUT AHMET ÖĞÜT

Ahmet Öğüt’s (b. 1981) work encompasses video, photography, and installation. His work is exhibited in both the public space and in museums. After studying fine arts at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Öğüt went on to obtain his MA in art and design at Yildiz Teknik University in Istanbul. From 2007 to 2008 he was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work has been exhibited at Kunstverein in Dresden, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, and Centre Pompidou in Paris. Öğüt was one of the artists selected to represent Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. At the moment, Öğüt’s work Bakunin’s Barricade is on display at the Stedelijk Museum as part of the exhibition In the Presence of Absence.