Review : Videos & Films Collection Pierre Huber (English/French)

The visionary Geneva gallerist Pierre Huber, whose broader collection was recently the subject of Private View 1980-2000 here offers a more closely defined--and more recent--cache, his video art. With works by Nam June Paik, Annika Larson, Shirin Neshat, Kader Attia and Yoshua Okon.

Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in Qazvin, Iran. As a teenager she moved to the U.S. to study art at the University of California, Berkeley. Five years later, following Iranis Islamic Revolution, she found herself in unintentional exile, unable to return home. It would be another 15 years before she went back, and before she began to make the art for which she is best known. Her first solo show, at Franklin Furnace, was followed by a long list of others, including exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center and the Tate Gallery. She has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and the Whitney Biennial, and in film festivals including Tribeca and Sundance. Her work has won the International Center of Photographyis Infinity Award and the First International Prize at the Venice Biennale.

Nam June Paik was born in 1932 in Seoul, Korea. He moved to New York from Germany in 1964, and by the late 60s was at the forefront of a new generation of artists creating an aesthetic discourse out of television and the moving image. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Paik also worked as a teacher and an activist, supporting other artists and working to realize the potential of the emerging medium of video. Along with his remarkable sequence of videotapes and projects for television--featuring collaborations with friends Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, David Bowie, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham--he created a series of installations that fundamentally changed video and redefined artistic practice.