History

Forty years ago, in 1984, at the kitchen table of a student flat share in Bonn, the idea was born to found one of the first festivals for video art in Germany in order to create a platform for this still new art form. What started as a student project by Dieter Daniels, Bärbel Moser and Petra Unnützer in Bonn's old town moved from galleries and stores to the Bonner Kunstverein for over a decade. Since 2005, the Videonale has found its base at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, presenting an elaborate exhibition and an extensive festival program every two years. At the same time, the festival has always remained deeply connected to the urban space, regularly showing its art at various public venues outside the museum. The participating artists include pioneering names such as Dara Birnbaum, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Klaus vom Bruch, Gary Hill, Keren Cytter, Marcel Odenbach, Bill Viola and Christian Jankowski. For many of these artists, the VIDEONALE was the first opportunity to present their works to an international audience. To this day, the festival remains committed to its founding idea of reflecting current trends in time-based art and presenting them to a broad audience.

The Rhineland, which became known as an experimental field for video art in the 1980s with protagonists such as Nam June Paik, Marcel Odenbach, Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch, still offers ideal conditions for a festival like the Videonale today with numerous exhibition venues, festivals, production sites and collections that focus on this art form, as well as the Academy of Media Arts as a unique educational institution in this field. Nowhere else have there been and still are such diverse opportunities to see and learn about these art forms and to bring them into resonance with other arts and cultural fields. Videonale is and remains rooted there, raising the important question: