Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy
video_dumbo (Selection from the 2013 program)
video_dumbo is an annual festival and exhibition of international contemporary moving image which we have curated since 2005 in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY.
For the past eight years, video_dumbo has established itself as one of New York’s premier exhibition venues for international video art. Since its inception, it has always been a place where emerging and mid-career artists find themselves juxtaposed in both exhibition and screening programming. We have been a platform and meeting spot for local moving image artists, as well as a venue for those artists from other countries and continents that we feel are strongly underrepresented in the US, or simply have not found their way into the NY art scene and/or its festival circuit.
With TwoTree's full support we enjoyed the luxury of presenting our festival in Dumbo's massive 15,000 square-foot warehouses (in four different locations over the years) which always allowed us to have the screening area embedded into the exhibition, surrounded by installations. Unfortunately, there is no more raw large industrial spaces left in Dumbo, so this year we made the decision to leave the Dumbo Arts Festival, to move over the bridge and team up with Eyebeam in Chelsea. Still, we continued working with the Dumbo Arts Center and launched a month-long solo exhibition and performance by Kurt Ralske as this year's kick-off event at DAC's 111 Front Street Gallery, while the main exhibition, screening program and other performances took place at Eyebeam.
Throughout the years we have had the privilege of presenting well-established Venice Biennale and Documenta artists, such as Eija-Liisa Ahtilla, Christina Jankowski, Thomson and Craighead, John Smith, Breda Beban, Yang Zhenzhong and Tony Conrad, in addition to well-known New York artists such as Ken Jacobs, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Paul Chan, Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, Patty Chang, and Shelly Silver and many others.
This May, video_dumbo set its own record by including 106 artists from 30 countries with works that came from remote places such as Chittagong, Bangladesh and Tarabulus, Lebanon. Highlights this year included eight installations under the exhibition title RE-RETURN TO SENDER.
Every year the program also includes guest curated programs, special events and live performances. In this section we have put a lot of emphasis on presenting works not only from places, and nations outside the usual Western art radar, but occasionally from cities that are hardly known to a general audience. Past featured programs included, for instance, the cities of Novi Sad, Kampala, Kuala Lumpur, Beirut and Split. Guest curators had been Nat Muller, Nani Kahar, Dragan Zivancevic, Alice Smits and Lee Ellickson, Rebecca Cleman, Aspect Video, ETC, Rachel Steinberg and Jim Supanick as well as live performances by Thomas Zummer, Sandra Gibson and Luis Recorder, Animal Charm, Ezekiel Honig, Chris Jordan, Luke Dubois, Richard Gareth and Andy Graydon and CHiKA.
Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy, co-directors of video_dumbo
www.videodumbo.org
Caspar Stracke and Gabriela Monroy
Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker from Germany, living and working in New York City since 1993 and Helsinki (since 2012).
His work is situated around architecture and urbanism, media archaeology as well as various socio-political aspects of cinema. His films, videos and installation work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, retrospectives and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia.
In 1999 he completed his first feature-length 35mm film project CIRCLE'S SHORT CIRCUIT which toured throughout the US and Europe and was selected for the American Century Part II exhibition at the Whitney Museum, NY. He is the recipient of a Rockefeller Media Art fellowship and various project Grants from Hamburg-Schleswig-Holstein Between 2000-2011 he was an active member of THE THING, a NY-based nexus for art and net culture.
Since 2005 he is the co-director of video_dumbo an annual exhibition/festival for contemporary video art in NYC, co-presented with Dumbo Arts Center. He also works as a screen designer for stage productions and collaborating as MOSTRA with his wife, Gabriela Monroy. Caspar Stracke is currently teaching as a professor for Contemporary Art and Moving Image at KUVA Art Academy Helsinki.
Gabriela Monroy is a Mexican videoartist and video curator living and working between Berlin, New York and Mexico City. In 2001 she received a Masters in Film and Video from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. In 2001 she was awarded Mexico's National Foundation for Culture and Arts Fellowship for Young Emerging Artists. In 2002 she was selected with a four channel video installation, as part of the 10th National Biennial of Photography of Mexico. Since 2002 she has been working in collaboration with the German video artist Caspar Stracke under the name MOSTRA. In 2004 they were awarded a NYSCA Film and Media Production Grant for an Interactive video installation for cinema space and since 2005 they are the directors of video_dumbo, an international videoart festival in New York. In 2009 she was selected as one of The MacDowell Colony's National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipients. In 2011 she was awarded a NYFA/ Deutsche Bank America's Foundation Fellowship in Digital and Electronic Arts as well as a grant from FONCA, Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and Arts. She has participated in exhibitions in Mexico, Europe, Korea and the US, and her work is part of the INBA collection, Mexico’s National Institute for Fine Arts.