Media orientation on the exhibitions
Thursday, 22 May 2025, 11 a.m. or individual guided tour by appointment
Kunst Museum Winterthur | At the Stadthaus, Museumstrasse 52, 8400 Winterthur

The history of video art was largely written by female artists. Under the title Re:Wind, the Kunst Museum Winterthur is showing works by over 20 different female video artists from its collection since the late 1960s.

Meat Joy, Touch Cinema, Pickelporno: The titles of the video works are programmatic and reflect the artists’ liberation from traditional role models and at the same time from classical art genres. Television and digital media have characterised our everyday lives since the 1960s. It is therefore hardly surprising that artists turned to electronic media. The ‘father of video art’, Nam June Paik, used powerful magnets to alter television images so that they mutated into non-objective forms. With the availability of the portable video recorder at the end of the 1960s, the triumphant advance of new media began. The term ‘video art’ refers to the medium, which is presented in the form of single-channel tapes, as part of a video installation or as a video sculpture.

The history of video art was largely written by female artists. They often used the medium to document performative actions, such as Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann and Mona Hatoum. Sometimes performances were developed solely for the video camera. Or the technology itself was thematised in order to explore the possibilities of the time-based medium. Easy access to the technical possibilities of digital storage media led to cinematic works whose content radically differed from the glossy aesthetics of Hollywood productions in order to explore their own, often unsettling visual worlds, as in Keren Cytter’s trashy works or Zilla Leutenegger’s poetic visual inventions.

Thanks to a donation from Heinz E. Toggenburger and other donations, the Kunst Museum Winterthur has been able to assemble an important collection of new media, from which Re:Wind now presents the views of female artists on the medium.

With:
Yael Bartana
Lynda Benglis
Dara Birnbaum
Filipa César
Keren Cytter
Silvie Defraoui
Valie Export
Sylvie Fleury
Mona Hatoum
Sharon Hayes
Emily Jacir
Joan Jones
Zilla Leutenegger
Charlie Prodger
Pipilotti Rist
Martha Rosler
Carolee Schneemann
Hannah Wilke