Public Lecture Series: Video Art: Connecting Across the Arts

LS25 is a Big Ideas lecture course that is also open to the public. All lectures are located at BAMPFA in the Osher theater.

How have artists made use of the screen? What are the opportunities and hazards of using the screen as a vehicle for connection? A stunning roster of artists, curators, designers, and critics explore these questions and more as we explore the politics and aesthetics of video art. Developed from mixed media experiments of the 1960s through to new digital and virtual aesthetics of our current moment, video and media art offer opportunities to explore cross-pollination amongst many art forms—including cinema, photography, painting, sculpture, dance, theater, performance art, design, and even in literature.

In addition to exploring these experiments in form, video artists have created varied interventions in theme, often addressing some of the most pressing social issues of our time–including climate change, racial equity, gendered power, and the ethics of technology itself. Join our weekly Thursday noon series to hear from local luminaries and international experts as they reflect on the artistry, politics and impact of video art.

Video Across the Arts: Framing a Cross-Disciplinary Conversation

January 19, 2023
with Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson is Hadidi Professor of Rhetoric & of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley with Faculty Appointments in Art Practice, History of Art, Berkeley Center for New Media, and BAMPFA. She served as the UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor for Arts and Design from 2015 to 2021. She serves on the boards of several museums and arts organizations and is a founding board member and program director for the Kramlich Art Foundation.

Video Across the Arts: Film and Cinema

January 26, 2023
with Greg Niemeyer

Greg Niemeyer is a data artist. Niemeyer co-founded the Berkeley Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of new media and human experiences. His work focuses on data circulations among individuals, communities and environments. His projects often materialize data in a way that people can feel. He is Professor of Media Innovation, Toban Fellow, Director of the Art Practice Graduate Program.

Dutch Painting, Performance Art, and the World of Video

February 2, 2023
with Bart Rutten

Bart Rutten has been the artistic director of the Centraal Museum Utrecht since May 2017. He was previously the head of collections at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Recent projects included the exhibitions The Oasis of Matisse (2015) and the Russian Avant-Garde (2013). He also contributed to the redesign of the contemporary art collection in 2012. Bart worked closely with artists including Rineke Dijkstra, Stanley Brouwn, Joan Jonas and John Knight.

Video Across the Arts: Performance on Video

February 9, 2023
with NIC Kay

NIC Kay is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and conceptual choreographer who works with movement to explore relationality and yearning. They are obsessed with the act and process of moving, the change of place, production of space and the clarity gained from shifting of perspective. NIC has shown work, spoken on panels and hosted workshops throughout the United States and internationally. In 2023, they joined the Art Practice Faculty at UC Berkeley.

Video and Social Intervention: Indigenous cross-media aesthetics

February 16, 2023
with Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist and craftsperson merging traditional Native American materials and forms with those of Western contemporary art to create a new hybrid visual vocabulary. Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is forging a multifarious practice that redresses the exclusion and erasure of indigenous art traditions from the history of Western art as it explores the complexity and fluidity of identity. The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco was inaugurated with the solo exhibition by Gibson titled This Burning World.

Video Art and Social Intervention: What's that Noise?

March 2, 2023
with Ken Ueno

A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno (b. 1970), is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival.

Video Art and Social Intervention: Curating Out of Africa

March 9, 2023
with Julie Rodrigues Widholm

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive since Fall 2020. Before joining BAMFA, Wildholm was director at DePaul Art Museum at DePaul University from 2015 to 2020. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied modern art history, theory and criticism.

Video Art and Social Intervention: Forms of Life with William Kentridge and Judith Butler

March 16, 2023
with William Kentridge and Judith Butler

William Kentridge (South African, b.1955) is a filmmaker, draughtsman, and sculptor, and the son of Sydney Kentridge, one of South Africa''s foremost anti-apartheid lawyers. After studying politics and African history at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 1973 until 1976, Kentridge studied Fine Art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–1978) and the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. His works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. They received a Mellon Foundation grant to found and developed the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2016-2020) where they serve now as Co-Chair of the Board and editorial member of Critical Times.

Video Art and Social Intervention: “Weerasethakul and Kentridge: from Theater to Gallery and Beyond”

March 23, 2023
with Kate Mackay and Susan Oxtoby

Kate Mackay is associate curator of film at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive since 2016.

Susan Oxtoby is director of film and senior film curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She serves on the National Film Preservation Board, an advisory committee for the Library of Congress. She is currently working on a historical survey of Georgian Cinema.

Video Art and Social Intervention: The Identities, Avatars, and Algorithms of Lynn Hershman

April 6, 2023
with Lynn Hershman Leeson

Over the last five decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her art and films. Cited as one of the most influential media artists, Hershman Leeson is widely recognized for her innovative work investigating issues that are now recognized as key to the workings of society: the relationship between humans and technology, identity, surveillance, and the use of media as a tool of empowerment against censorship and political repression. Artwork by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Tate Modern, The National Gallery of Canada, and the Walker Art Center in addition to many celebrated private collections.

Video Art in Circulation: Danielle Dean and the Implication of the Viewer

April 13, 2023
with Danielle Dean

Danielle Dean is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the geopolitical and material processes that colonize the mind and body. Drawing from the aesthetics and history of advertising, and from her multinational background—born to a Nigerian father and an English mother in Alabama, and brought up in a suburb of London—her work explores the ideological function of technology, architecture, marketing, and media as tools of subjection, oppression, and resistance.

Video Art in Circulation: Documentation, Access, and the role of Media Art Platforms

April 20, 2023
with Rudolf Frieling

Rudolf Frieling was appointed SFMOMA’s curator of media arts in January 2006. Frieling is an adjunct faculty member at California College of the Arts and has lectured on media history and theory at institutions nationally and internationally. He studied English literature, social sciences, and philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and received a PhD from Universität Hildesheim.

Video Art in (Re)Circulation: Recalling our Conversation Across the Disciplines

April 27, 2023
with Shannon Jackson and Greg Niemeyer