Spike

Spike is a quarterly magazine for contemporary art that was founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, published in Vienna. The magazine offers new, illuminating, and unconventional perspectives on art and contemporary trends. The inclusion of many voices from the art world, subjective points of view and a first hand directness grant a new proximity to reality.
The heart of the magazine are major contributions on five artists whose work we consider decisive for current artistic debates. In essays, critics from various backgrounds write on contemporary art and analyze developments in contemporary culture.
The art world of Eastern Europe is highly present in Spike; the close interlinking between art and life, art and society, and the existential contribution made by Eastern European artists bear an affinity to the spirit of Spike. Spike believes that the world can be transformed by art, not just through its mere existence, but by bringing its ideas to the most possible people.

VIDEONALE 11 - Festival of Contemporary Video Art 15.03-15.04 Kunstmuseum Bonn

Red, erotic, carnal, halfway between glamour and cannibalism : this is how the mouth with its impeccable white teeth filling the screen of the monitor shows itself. This work by video artist Lia Anna Hennig, who lives in England, is one of the fifty exhibits presented at the VIDEONALE between 15 March and 15 April 2007 in the Kunstmuseum Bonn. Besides the latest video creations of/by artists such as Jeanne Faust, Christoph Girardet or Mischa Kuball, the exhibition also presents works by young artists like the Japanese Hideyuki Tanaka, who shows the strange rites surrounding a godlike figure called Jappy, or French artist Jean- Gabriel Périot, who investigated the public punishment of French women accused of having affairs with German soldiers during World War 2. "We want to show the whole spectrum of video art today. Above all, we are interested in the appeal of the contemporary. What we particularly notice is the enormous variety of the works submitted: Narrative and documentary items, clips, animated films and cartoons, political videos, works of purely formal character, performance-videos. A particularly interesting trend this year is the number of videos by artists with a migratory background: Never before did we receive so many works by artists whose names, at first glance, do not fit the countries in which they live" says Georg Elben, curator of VIDEONALE 11. The five-strong jury examined more than 600 new video works, from Taiwan, China, Korea, Australia, Brazil, Spain, France, the USA and other countries. For a whole week Cecilia Anderson - freelance curator at the Tate Liverpool, Karen van den Berg - lecturer in art at the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, Katja Davar - artist and participant in Videonale 10, Tomasz Wendland - artist and curator of the IF Museum Inner Spaces in Poznan, and Georg Elben, curator of the Videonale 11, met on the premises of the KfW Banking Group, which is once again acting as a major patron of the VIDEONALE.