ArtKrush Post

LOOP, Barcelona’s annual video art festival founded in 2003, runs through early June. Throughout the city’s center, screens flicker as museums, shops, and schools transform into uniquely localized exhibition spaces. This year’s event features more than 800 artists and numerous special programs. Highlights include the first Barcelona screening of Matthew Barney’s five-part Cremaster Cycle, an allegorical series exploring processes of creation; the debut of a brand-new piece by Beckett-esque UK artist Ceal Floyer; and LOOP Maghreb/Pakistan, an initiative encouraging small migrant-owned businesses to host artworks from their home countries.

LOOP presents a three-day video art fair at the tail end of the festival, with participation from 45 international galleries. Among them, New York’s Luxe Gallery offers a solo show about facial distortion and masking by Finnish artist Pia Lindman, and Frankfurt’s Galerie Anita Beckers screens Irish artist Clare Langan’s prizewinning Metamorphosis, an experimental piece centered on landscape.

e-flux video rental (EVR) is a traveling rental shop and public screening room as well as a rapidly expanding film and video archive, operated under the auspices of New York’s electronic flux corporation since 2004. Installed as a stylishly minimalist, glass-faced boutique, EVR’s globetrotting shop boasts a formidable inventory of videos, any of which can be borrowed, or sampled on the premises, at no cost. The collection includes works from the late ’50s to the present day, with contemporary titles ranging from RE: The Operation, a Paul Chan piece about prewar life in Baghdad, to Laleh Khorramian’s Sophie and Goya, a colorful animation that follows its wistful protagonist through a succession of striking environmental shifts. With previous appearances in Antwerp, Budapest, Miami, Seoul, Istanbul, and the Canary Islands — to name only a handful of geographical locales — EVR is currently moored in Paris through mid-July.

Perpetual Art Machine (PAM), founded in 2003, bills itself as “the video art portal” and supports an online video art community, gallery, and database as well as a related traveling video installation. Artist videos submitted to PAM’s website are categorized according to a list of keywords, which can be used to “auto-curate” the group’s exhibitions. Installations comprise a grid of up to 16 videos from the database playing simultaneously, and viewers may manipulate the theme or enlarge a single image if they so desire. Cacophonous juxtapositions give way to calming abstractions as video works, and reworks, its magic. (SK)

LOOP Video Art Festival runs through June 3 in Barcelona, and the related LOOP Video Art Fair takes place from May 31 through June 2. e-flux video rental is currently in Paris through July 15, and Perpetual Art Machine has a project on view at House of Campari in West Hollywood through May 31.