Part Two of Many Parts
Looking at Video Art — West x LI-MA

With Peter Bogers, Giovanni Giaretta, Johan Grimonprez, Simone C. Niquille & Keigo Yamamoto

02.09.2023 — 29.10.2023

West Den Haag, Lange Voorhout 102, 2514 EJ, Den Haag, The Netherlands

Stomp your feet on the table, kiss in protest and dream with your eyes open. Video art, the technological medium, often offers a new perspective on humanity and physicality. Behind the shiny, sleek surface of the television screen hides a slippery, grubby world. For the exhibition 'Part Two of Many Parts', West, in collaboration with LI-MA, is showing a selection of five extraordinary video works in five different office rooms.

Artists focus their camera on the body, in all its tangibility, but also make the corporeal abstract. The stamping feet in the early video work of Keigo Yamamoto become a game to themselves through clever use of video technology. The camera doubles, the monitor mirrors. The manipulation is playful and innocent. But what if body and camera are used as political tools? In Grimonprez’s ‘Kiss-o-drome’, physicality is an act of resistance. The video recounts how kissing in a public space, an activity banned at the time, is used en masse as a protest against repression in dictatorial Brazil in the 1980s. Simone C. Niquille melds the physical body and its digital representation in ‘The Fragility of Life’ — showing how physical deception is part of the American elections. Here, the senses are fooled, and the mind is played on. The camera of the artist is both a lie detector that unmasks, and a manipulative instrument that plays tricks on the truth. That visible reality is also a construct is addressed by Giovanni Giaretta in 'A thing among things'. In this work, he reshapes the visual memories of blind people. Senses merge as memories fade away. Close your eyes and watch…

Curator Sanneke Huisman selected the second series of five artworks. This time with a focus on ‘body-parts’. For example, Keigo Yamamoto exhibits the work ‘Foot No.3’ from 1977, Peter Bogers: 'Life by Life (long version)' from 1988, Giovanni Giaretta: ‘A thing among things' from 2015, Johan Grimonprez: 'Kiss-o-drome’ from 2016, and Simone C. Niquille: ‘The Fragility of Life’ from 2017.

An important part of ‘Part Two of Many Parts’ is also the Wikipedia writing workshop initiated by LI-MA. The project team has been travelling around the Netherlands since 2021 with a clear goal: to publish 500 Wikipedia articles on media artists. Together with museums, universities, and Wikimedia Netherlands, additional visibility and accessibility is ensured. Parallel to the exhibition, the public Wikipedia writing workshop will be held in the ‘Alphabetum’ venue of West.

Peter Bogers He examines the breaking points between music-sound and sound-speech. In his works, the unity and identity of the body, as it can be perceived from the outside, has made way for fragmentation and alienation.

Giovanni Giaretta artistic practice tells the ordinary in unexpected ways and describes a world that reveals its most unusual aspects. He reflects on the invention of commonplaces within specific narratives and groups of individuals, he explores minor literature and stories of invisibility, he investigates the creation of invented languages. As ‘collages’, his works are the result of a research process that aims to relate images, texts and sounds.

Johan Grimonprez uses found footage, mixing reality and fiction; history becomes a multi-perspectival dimension open to manipulation. Grimonprez exhibited his work all over the world and he took part in Documenta X.

Simone C. Niquille is a Swiss designer and researcher. Her studio Technoflesh examines the representation of identity without a body and the increasingly omnipresent optic gaze of everyday objects.

Keigo Yamamoto is a mixed-media artist. He began to experiment with ‘network art’. His communication-based games were featured in the 1975 São Paulo Art Biennial and at Documenta 6 in Germany in 1977.