This new artistic trend, video shot for the gallery, was founded by Nam June Paik. He made a video recording of a gathering of artists and presented this as a work of art.
American artists received grants from the government to make videos for cable television. They wanted their videos to differ from commercials, actions movies and newsreels. Above all, video artists mocked at TV clichйs. The RuArts exhibition features Richard Serras' Bumerang with a heroine uttering an endless and incomprehensible but very enthusiastic speech. Sometimes video art is not simple irony but open attacks on TV dictatorship, for instance Media Burn by Ant Farm.
Today video art is highly popular all over the world except Russia. First Russian video artists Boris Yukhananov and Sergei Borisov created their first work in 1986.
The exhibition presents the works marking important stages in the history of video art. The show of the Russian anthology begins with Aidan Salakhova's video installation. She projected video on a painting. This is an original cultural dialogue between painting and video.
The exhibition also features the first work by Boris Yukhananov and fragments of Sergei Shutov's computer animation.
Among the showpieces are performances of the Collective Actions group shot in 1989-1991, Pirated Television by Timur Novikov and Vladik Mamyshev-Monro, and Vadim Koshkin's alternative videos Puzzle and Brain Parasites resembling psychedelic effects.
