14. Videokunst Förderpreis Bremen

Last year, around 100 artists from German-speaking countries and the twin cities of Bremen/Bremerhaven responded to the Bremen Film Office’s call to submit concepts for previously unrealized video art works for the Bremen Video Art Promotion Prize. Last year’s jury – Ulrike Kremeier (plattform, Berlin), Hermann Nöring (EMAF, Osnabrück) and Winfried Pauleit (University of Bremen) – awarded the first prize of 5000 € and to Katarina Matiasek (Vienna) and Michaela Schweiger (Berlin). The promotional prize of 1500 € was awarded to Christian Meyer and Werner Kuhrmann (Bremen).

Michaela Schweiger offers her “city of tomorrow-revisited” as a walk-through projection: as in a relay race, different people lead minimalist stories through the modernist Hansa district in Berlin. In the process, descriptions of the state of affairs and retrospectives on the architects’ utopias of 1957 are interwoven.

Katarina Matiasek worked out the sound curve from the photographed coastline of a small anonymous island using a virtual synthesizer. The work is entitled “Island Playback.” While the oscillations of this coastline move through the video image, the island is played back acoustically, as if it had been placed on a turntable. The soundtrack is musically arranged by Skanner aka Robin Rimbaud, London.
Christian Meyer and Werner Kuhrmann show in their jointly developed work “Four Knocks” an interaction of various elements from computer games and comic quotes, which in film and relief ensembles refer to each other in terms of content without losing their visual autonomy.

The awarding of the Bremen Video Art Promotion Prize is made possible by the support of the Bremen Senator for Culture, the Bremische Landesmedienanstalt, BIA Bremer Innovations-Agentur GmbH, Radio Bremen and the artists’ association GEDOK.