Series Features Video Premiere

The world premiere showing of Marcel Odenbach’s The Idea of Africa will highlight the inaugural presentation in the Global Video series at the Handwerker Gallery. Four of Odenbach’s videos will be shown at the gallery on Thursday and Friday, February 25 and 26, beginning at 7:00 p.m. The screenings will be introduced by Megan Roberts, associate professor and chair of the Department of Television-Radio; they are free and open to the public.

A native of Cologne, Germany, where he still lives and works, Odenbach studied architecture, art history, and semiotics at the Technische Hochschule Aachen, earning his degree in 1979. From 1992 to 1998 he was a professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe. He has exhibited his works in museums in Berlin, Basel, Madrid, and London, among other cities, and recently concluded a one-person exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City.

Handwerker director Jelena Stojanovic says that as part of its ongoing commitment to contemporary art, the gallery has a duty to introduce the public to the arguably most interesting and innovative artistic medium today — video art productions. "More than ever before, art is conceived as a global and heterogeneous enterprise, one that speaks across the boundaries of a single and specialized medium as well as across national and racial boundaries," says Stojanovic. "Our Global Video series welcomes difference and the endeavor to go beyond the very idea of boundary."

In addition to The Idea of Africa, the screenings will include Estar de pie es no caerse (Standing Is Not Falling), Vom Kommen und vom Gehen (Coming and Going), and As If Memories Could Deceive Me.