tank.tv’s latest online exhibition of video art has been curated by Ian White, Adjunct Film Curator for Whitechapel Gallery, London. ‘The Whole World’ presents a programme of artists’ film and video that deploys a list as part of its structure, often with political intent: to subvert hierarchies, to undermine rationalism or to reveal contradiction. In contemporary culture the pop chart’s Top 10 has been replaced by an ever-expanding craze for “Top 100s” of everything from Hollywood genres to celebrity gaffes. ‘The Whole World’ attempts to wrestle back the initiative.
Works by Dalia Neis, Uriel Orlow, Jean-Gabirel Périot, Michael Robinson and Valerie Tevere take as their subject such wildly diverse lists as depictions of saints, everything on Ebay, magazine advertising, our mediated world, protest, violence and war, the pages of National Geographic magazine and the words spoken by people on the streets of New York. Text scrolls across the screen, images flash past, immersive landscapes ultimately disintegrate. Many things are logged and something is undone.
Viewers are also invited to contribute to the online exhibition programme by uploading their own video lists onto tank.tv, be that an extract from an existing work or something made specially for the purpose, to compile a unique, exponential collection: an extraordinary list of lists, of the world as we know it – the whole world.
Ian White is Adjunct Film Curator for Whitechapel Gallery, London, an independent curator, writer and artist. Recent projects include Kinomuseum for the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and a new performance work in collaboration with Jimmy Robert for STUK, Belgium and De Appel, Amsterdam (2007/8).
The Whole World: curated by Ian White
Until 1 March 2008
www.tank.tv
