Artists Space

SCOPE
Summer Video Festival

SCOPE was a six-week-long summer video festival curated by Pip Day and comprised by various elements: a rotating exhibition in the Main Gallery, an exhibition as part of the Artists Select Series in the Project Space, and two days of non-curated Open Video Calls.

The structure of the exhibition was designed as an attempt to eliminate the role of the curator. The work received through an international call for entries served as the starting point for Day’s curatorial direction, which would be minimized as much as possible. The exhibition rotated three times, and for every SCOPE (1, 2, and 3), the material was reviewed only two weeks before projection.

[A black and white flyer displaying a large, square box. Positioned at the top edge of the interior of the box is large, sans-serif text that reads, "SCOPE." Smaller black text above the box reads, "Number 5 / Voume 4 New York City / Artists Space / summer video festival / June 4 - July 17, 1998."]

Project Space

As part of Artists Space’s ongoing Artists Select Series, Liisa Roberts selects Finnish video artists Marjatta Oja to present a video installation, Cinema, which fragments cinematic narrative devices, transforming them into ‘objects’. With these fragments, Oja challenges the viewer to attempt to understand the different layers of memory and how they form our consciousness. Oja will also exhibit a slide installation entitled Windows. Roberts also selects collaborating filmmakers Nicolás Guagnini (Argentina) and Karin Schneider (Brazil) to exhibit Phantom Limb, a 16mm fictional documentary film about the development of modernism in Argentina, Brazil and Poland. Rather than presenting a didactic thesis about art and politics in these three ‘peripheral’ countries, the film acts as a fictional and poetic construction of a possible Art History. Phantom Limb will be screened at 11am, 1, 3 and 5pm Tuesday-Thursday and every hour on the half hour from 10:30am on Fridays and Saturdays.

– Extract from the press release for SCOPE