Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series: When Absence Becomes Presence – Curated by Sonja Simonyi and Niels Van Tomme :: December 4, 2008 :: Calling all Video and Sound artists – Deadline: September 17 (postmarked).

For When Absence Becomes Presence, the next installment of the WPA’s Experimental Media Series, curators Sonja Simonyi and Niels Van Tomme have organized an exhibition of international sound and video art at the WPA’s new headquarters. Dealing with issues of memory, meaning and representation, the exhibition is a play between two separate, but inherently linked conditions: absence and presence. Both states can be mediated through representations in images and sound; what is absent can become present and presence can be experienced through the realization that something is not there.

“We have known at least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are regarding not a real pipe but one that has been re-presented. The pipe as such isn’t there, it isn’t present; instead, it is depicted as being absent.” – Boris Groys

For a screening accompanying this exhibition, the curators are calling all video and sound artists to submit works that explore these notions in innovative ways. A selection of the received video and sound works will be presented along with works from the show on December 4, 2008 in the framework of a public screening. Selected artists will be notified during the last week of October. Additionally, two artists submitting the most compelling entries, as reviewed by the curators and based on overall quality and innovation, will be awarded the Kraft Prize for New Media of $750 and the WPA Experimental Media Prize of $750 on the night of the event. Please note that the WPA Prize will go to an artist living and working in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Sonja Simonyi is a film researcher, currently pursuing a PhD in Cinema Studies at NYU. Previously, she has worked at the National Gallery of Art’s film department where she organized the film series Modernity and Tradition: Film in Interwar Central Europe, which traveled to the Guggenheim Museum in New York, among other venues.

Niels Van Tomme is a curator and researcher. His exhibitions and screenings are shown internationally and investigate the sociopolitical aspects of contemporary audiovisual culture. Since fall 2007, he is the Curator and Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Library in Washington, DC.

DOWNLOAD FULL CALL FOR ENTRIES AND ENTRY FORM HERE: For more information please call the WPA office at (+1) 202.234.7103.