YouTube-O-Theque of Johan Grimonprez

La Bande Vidéo is proud to join La Manif d’Art 5 for the presentation of the exhibition YouTube-O-Theque of Johan Grimonprez. The work of this artist is questioning the media image and the predominating role of mass media on our consciousness of the world and ourselves. For this exhibition, he collaborated with Charlotte Léouzon, curator in Paris specialized in new media and film.

YouTube-o-Theque: Maybe the sky is really green and we’re just color blind, features a compilation of clips from online television, cell phone videos, blogs, and YouTube. Shown for the first time in Canada, this YouTube-o-Theque library mixes reality and fiction in a wholly innovative fashion, and presents contemporary history as a multi-perspectival context, readily open to manipulation. Grimonprez remarks, “While Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein defined montage as a revolutionary tool for social analysis, MTV and CNN have totally surpassed this. The commercial break and the remote control installed zapping as a new way to relate to the world in the 80s. But today with YouTube and Google we don’t zap anymore, we now skip and navigate a reality zone defined in ‘downloadtime’ and where images of Abu Grahib, 9-11, and the swine flu have become the new contemporary sublime, which has turned the political debate into mere fear management.”

Born in Roeselare, Belgium, Johan Grimonprez lives and Works in New York city. He studied at the School of Visual Arts and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. He achieved international acclaim with his film essay, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Grimonprez’s Looking for Alfred won the International Media Award (ZKM, Germany) in 2005 as well as the European Media Award in 2006. His curatorial projects were hosted at major exhibitions and museums worldwide and his productions have traveled the main festival circuit from Telluride, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, to Tokyo and Berlin.