Joep Van Liefland at AMP, Greece

‘Video Palace’ is an open-ended artwork, which the artist has been installing in different locations (art spaces but also the public realm) since 2002 and is based on two activities of the artist: the creation of a massive video collection and the production of his own films, where the protagonist is mostly himself. Van Liefland’s video collection spans from B to Z movies: erotic, horror to promotional tapes for companies, travel, pet movies, propaganda and informational films.

For his own films, Van Liefland uses the iconography of the videos he collects but breaks down their format in order to produce new meaning and reflect thus on the medium. In his own words, his films are ‘poetic de-reconstructions’ of existing media.

His paintings are also referential to the media culture. They deal with serial commodities which were originally produced for media storage and have been transformed. Van Liefland has a has a great interest in media that shift from new to avant-garde commodities and end up being anonymous. His paintings could be seen as mechanically assembled reproductions of serial commodities.

Afterlife is an archaeology, an exploration of the territory of the video medium. Released from any nostalgic concerns, Van Liefland’s work reveals its deep concern in the multifaceted existence of video: its technical development, distribution, content of films, its copy element, its different market segments, the stores and its contextual relation to art.

Crucial to Van Liefland is what the artist calls ‘media-entropy’, a term which refers to the media formats which are in decay. ‘Media-entropy’ refers to the transformations on information, on a cultural level but also to the physicality of the media – video is bound to the body and the changes in infrastructure – video shops and rentals that are gradually disappearing