The exhibition Pioneers of Media Art at Nxt Museum looks back at the formative years of MonteVideo, the first gallery in the Netherlands dedicated to video art. Drawn from the LI-MA archive, the exhibition shows how artists from the 1970s on – Livinus and Jeep van de Bundt, Nam June Paik, Nan Hoover, SERVAAS, Tom Klinkowstein, Trevor Batten – experimented with new technology and shaped the visual language of a medium as it emerged.
An exhibition like this is only possible because that material was kept. But the record is never complete. Alongside the works themselves, much of what makes early media art legible – recordings, photographs, printed matter, correspondence, and even the memory of how a piece was first shown – sits in private hands: with the artists, their collaborators and friends, and the people who were in the room.
If you hold documentation relating to this history, we'd like to hear from you. You don't have to part with anything – we're interested first in knowing what exists, and where. Get in touch at info@li-ma.nl.
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