The festival
11.4. to 18.5.2025 | Prologue from 16.11.2024
The Videonale – founded in 1984 at the kitchen table of a Bonn student flat-share by Dieter Daniels, Bärbel Moser and Petra Unnützer – is one of the oldest festivals for video art and time-based art in the world and has now been held every two years in Bonn for 40 years. Since 2005, a 6-week exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bonn with exclusively time-based works has been a central part of the festival. An extensive program invites a diverse (specialist) audience to engage intensively with the works and the artists at the prologue, during the opening days and parallel to the duration of the exhibition.
In 2025, we will celebrate the 20th edition of Videonale from April 11 to May 18, 2025 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and at various locations in the city. The festival will open on April 10, 2025. Tasja Langenbach and Annette Ziegert are the artistic directors of VIDEONALE.20.
We have taken the anniversary as an opportunity to look back at previous festival editions and their artists and to trace and present exemplary artistic lines of development and their networks up to the present day. To do this, we delved deep into the festival's impressive archive: Over 1,200 works from around 1,000 artistic positions have been shown over the past decades. The works and artistic positions of the last 19 Videonale festivals (1984-2023) were reviewed by a selection committee and around 180 works were invited to be selected for VIDEONALE.20. The aim was to select historical works and current productions that are significant for the history of the festival and video art and that will be brought into diverse resonance with each other and the audience as part of the exhibition and festival program. A total of 27 artistic positions were selected for the VIDEONALE.20 for the exhibition in the art museum and for venues in the city.
With the festival program HANDLE WITH CARE, the Videonale invites visitors to engage intensively with the works on the opening days (11/12 April 2025) and throughout the duration of the exhibition with introductions, resonances, lecture performances, guided tours, workshops and talks. Screenings and performances will take place as SATELLITES in parks, historic buildings, private living rooms and a mega-tower. Performative EXCURSIONS lead along the exhibition stations through the city. The program is being developed in close partnership with actors from urban society. From November 16, 2025, the PROLOGUE to VIDEONALE.20 will start with VIDEO EVENINGS at familiar and unfamiliar locations in various parts of Bonn.