Surrey Art Gallery exhibition shares rare survey of international and Canadian videopoetry
Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020 the first comprehensive retrospective of videopoetry in a Canadian art museum
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Nobuo Kubota, Untitled (n.d.), 1990, video still. Photo courtesy of the artist
Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to host the exhibition Poets with a Video Camera: Videopoetry 1980-2020, guest curated by Tom Konyves, from September 17 to December 11, 2022. Admission is free.
An opening reception takes place September 17 from 6:30 to 9 pm.
For curator Tom Konyves, a poet-critic, videopoetry is much more than a combination of video art and poetry. He describes the genre as the “rendering of poetry as an object to be experienced through the medium of video”. To succeed as a legitimate artform, the imagery in a videopoem—including on-screen text—does not illustrate the voiced text. Rather, videopoetry (as opposed to documentation of a poetry reading) distinguishes itself by poetic juxtapositions of images with text and sound. In the measured blending of these three elements, it produces in the viewer, Konyves argues, “the realization of a poetic experience.” It is an artform that perfectly reflects our times: our image- and text-saturated culture.
Poets with a Video Camera offers the first comprehensive retrospective of videopoetry in a Canadian art museum. Having coined the term videopoetry in 1978, Konyves wrote the 2011 essay “Videopoetry: A Manifesto”, which has helped define the genre internationally.
The exhibition features over 25 works by some of the world’s leading practitioners. It is organized around five categories of videopoetry: kinetic text, visual text, sound text, performance, and cin(e)poetry, each indicating that the work contains not only the essential element of text but also its mode of presentation.
Janet Lees, Hours of Darkness, 2014, video still. Photo courtesy of the artist
The title is a reference to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, which has become iconic in experimental film discussions in advocating for a complete separation from the language of theatre and literature to create the new artform of film. Similarly, Konyves argues for videopoetry to be thought of as creating a new artform without the separation from theatre and literature.
A media arts symposium titled New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things about Videopoetry takes place on November 5 from 12 to 5 pm. including a number of participating artists from the exhibition. On November 26, Surrey Art Gallery curator Jordan Strom will lead a two-part tour and conversation with Konyves and exhibiting artist Henry Tsang of Tansy Point from 2 to 3:30 pm.
Jim Andrews with Adeena Karasick, Checking In, 2018, video still. Photo courtesy of the artist
Born in Budapest and based in Montreal until 1983, Konyves is one of the original seven poets dubbed The Vehicule Poets. A graduate of Concordia University, he joined Montreal's first artist-run centre Vehicule Art in 1977, where he was instrumental in forming the “group of seven” which produced some of Montreal's most original multimedia performances, collage texts, videopoems, literary magazines, and books for their time. After he moved to Vancouver in the early 1980s—and later to Surrey, where he currently lives—Konyves continued to develop his literary and video practice. The Weimar Germany Poetry Festival and the Oeiras Poetry Festival in Portugal honoured him with a retrospective of his works in 2020 and 2021 respectively.
More information is at Surrey Art Gallery.
Post sponsored by Surrey Art Gallery.