Curator and Director of the Festival - Marina Fomenko

On September 7, the X International Video Art Festival Now & After opens at the WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art. The theme of the jubilee year is “The Possibility of Color”. This time the organizers of the project received about 800 applications from artists from 63 countries of the world.

Works of 48 artists from 22 countries will be shown in the Red Workshop: Russia, France, Australia, Brazil, USA, Japan, Ukraine, Colombia, Holland, Israel, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Germany, Taiwan, Ireland, Finland, Argentina, Morocco, Canada, Romania, Lithuania. The works of all festival participants will be presented as a multi-channel video installation. In their works, artists from different countries reflect on color as emotional, social and cultural metaphors of the real and virtual world, the space of memory and the possibilities of the future.

The dominant colors of recent months are the colors of isolation. These are the colors of the hospital, most often white, like those of Anastasia Denisova and Maria Alina in Bored in the House and Evgenia Berezina (Self-isolation), and the dull color of apartment buildings, from which no one leaves for months, like Ekaterina Danenova and Marina Rudenko (Izolyatsiya), and the colors of old films by Azedine El Waafi from Morocco in the Quarantine project.

Visitors will see unexpected and paradoxical colors of the future by John Sanborn from the USA (Fleeting Thoughts of the Future), bright colors of Yinglin Zhou's upcoming utopia One World, One Dream (Germany). Memory tinted the past in dark colors
grandfather for Smriti Mehra from Great Britain (“As Dadima is, so is Smriti”), and for Sofia Slonim from Russia - in the gray color of her father's sweater.

The pure colors of nature, blue and green, are forest and water. Those who live next to us are hiding in the forests (Eva Gurzna, Katarzhina Miron "From Afar", Finland). The werewolves of Dmitry Bulnygin live in the clear sea water, the "Waves" by Herve Penoa (France) freeze. Japanese artist Hiroya Sakurai takes us into the world of underwater rice plantations (Stream X).

Love has different colors: we see all the shades of red in anticipation of love from Natasha Danberg from Sweden ("Passion") and the cold color of marble of the eternal love of Venus and Adonis from the Italian artist Sylvia De Gennaro ("Aeternus Amor"). Toxic red dominates the ideograms of the imaginary language of André Perim from Brazil, which, according to the author, is so necessary for us because of the overabundance of information ("Infotoxication"). There is always a place for black and white mukino in the multicolor video palette. This is the poetic "Long Road" by Jacqueline Healy and Philippe Fojas from Ireland, and a dynamic collage based on the archival materials of Luis Carlos Rodriguez "Ani_av1_collage18_" (Spain). The interweaving of images from the films of Andrei Tarkovsky brings delicate color to the monochrome construct of Mikiel van Bakel from the Netherlands (“The Sanatorium Sonnestraal, re-modeled in time”).

Marina Fomenko, Curator, Director of the Now & After International Video Art Festival:
“Due to the pandemic, we have postponed the show of the main program of the X International Festival of Video Art Now & After from 2020 to 2021, and now we will show it in full at the exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Art Winzavod. The competitive program of our Festival was evaluated by a professional international jury. The winners of the festival were: 1st place - "Revision", Mikhail Zheleznikov (Russia), 2nd place was shared by "Recitative", Shir Handelsman (Israel) and "Monument", Sandra Pulido (Colombia). Honorable Mention by the Jury: “Space of Fossils”, Florence Levy (Argentina), “I am not a song that should be sung”, Toraj Khamenezade (USA), “Long Journey”, Jacqueline Healy, Philip Fojas (Ireland). These works, as well as all works of the competitive and non-competitive programs, can be seen at the exhibition. Our viewers have already seen the special program of the X Now & After Festival in the Educational Center of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Also Now & Then, together with MMOMA, we held a series of online meetings with the participants of the festival. "