Staging Film: the relation of image and space in video art

The exhibition Staging Film: the relation of image and space in video art builds on Busan's international reputation as a city of film, and its legacy as the host of one of the most important global film festivals. It seeks to explore the link between films seen in traditional cinema settings, and those that are experienced as an installation within a museum setting. If Cubism allowed for the painted image to exist along a multiplicity of vantage points, and if Pollock's drip paintings, with his body moving across the canvas, introduced temporality into the act of painting, similarly, video art has stripped the fixedness of still images and traditional film, collapsing their one point perspective and linear narrative.

The exhibition is constructed along two main curatorial axes. The first highlights the literal act of staging through which each of the featured artists conceives and presents their video(s) within a distinct physical space. The second, a metaphorical one, emphasizes the process by which the artists present their subjects within the films themselves. They achieve this either directly, in referencing theater or set-design, or indirectly, in the way they consciously stage them to encourage the viewer's voyeuristic gaze.

Each of the 12 artists in the exhibition is represented by one seminal installation that occupies its own distinct environment. Ranging from a 45-second loop to an 85-minute narrative, they make use of a different approach to the relationship between the projected image and the physical space in which they are staged. With works that date from the early 1990s until today, the exhibition illustrates how over the past two decades video artists have been subverting cinema's technical and formal characteristics in order to challenge the boundaries of the medium itself, thus expanding the viewer's experience of form, time and space.