The Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine or CIC was a
contemporary art
Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a ...
exhibition centre in
Geneva
Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
,
Switzerland
Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a landlocked country located in west-central Europe. It is bordered by Italy to the south, France to the west, Germany to the north, and Austria and Liechtenstein to the east. Switzerland ...
.
CIC was established in 1985 to organize events and exhibitions of images using new technologies such as video, multimedia, and the Internet, as well as more traditional photography and film. It was also named ''Saint-Gervais Genève'' (or SGG) between 1985 and 2008 when including several departments: Electronic media, Exhibitions, Theatre. Its existence goes from 1985 to 2008.
The CIC was established in 1985 to organize events in the field of electronic media. Director Andre Iten immediately included video, film, TV programmes and created the festival "The International video week" the same year (which was renamed "Biennial of Moving Images" in 1997). The Biennial gained international attention with major film and video retrospectives of
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an American performance art, performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performan ...
Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film.
Early life and education
Farocki was born as Harun El Usman FaroqhiMargalit Fox (3 August 2014)''New York Times''. in Neutitschein, which is n ...
,
Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro.
Life
In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
,
Jochen Gerz
Jochen Gerz (born 4 April 1940) is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, parti ...
,
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as ...
,
Gary Hill
Gary Hill (born April 4, 1951) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists of new media art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1 ...
,
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn (born 16 May 1957) is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris.Randy Kennedy (June 27, 2013)Bringing Art and Change to Bronx''New York Times''.
Trained in Zurich and inspired by Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, he began as a gra ...
,
William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming ...
,
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
,
Jean Painlevé
Jean Painlevé (20 November 1902 – 2 July 1989) was a French photographer and filmmaker who specialized in underwater fauna. He was the son of mathematician and twice prime minister of France Paul Painlevé.
Upbringing
A few days after P ...
Roman Signer
Roman Signer (born 1938 in Appenzell, Switzerland) is an artist who works in sculpture, art installation, photography, and video.
Early life and career
Signer started his career as an artist at the age of 28, after working various jobs such as an ...
, Pierrick Sorin,
Steina and Woody Vasulka
Steina Vasulka (born Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir in 1940) Soros Center for Contemporary Arts Budapest and Woody Vasulka ...
,
Bill Viola
William John Viola Jr. ( , ; January 25, 1951 – July 12, 2024) was an American video artist whose artistic expression depended upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human ...
Chris Marker
Chris Marker (; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) (born ''Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve'') was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and Essay#Film, film essayist. His best known films are ''La Jetée' ...
,
Guy Debord
Guy-Ernest Debord (; ; 28 December 1931 – 30 November 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situat ...
,
Joan Jonas
Joan Jonas (born July 13, 1936) is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, "a central figure in the performance art movement of the late 1960s".Stan Brackage,
Philippe Garrel
Philippe Garrel (; born 6 April 1948) is a French director, cinematographer, screenwriter, film editor, and producer, associated with the French New Wave movement. His films have won him awards at Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and ...
,
Chantal Akerman
Chantal Anne Akerman (; 6 June 19505 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York.
Akerman is best known for her films (1974), (1975), and '' News from Home'' (1976). The ...
, Anna Sanders Films,
Rebecca Horn
Rebecca Horn (24 March 1944 – 6 September 2024) was a German visual artist best known for her installation art, film directing and body modifications such as ''Einhorn'' (Unicorn), a body-suit with a very large horn projecting vertically from ...
.
Andre Iten carried out numerous collaborations with institutions, festivals and personalities around the globe. His strong vision and attention towards media by initiating festivals, Internet sites, artistic multimedia productions, a public video collection and collaborating on European projects. The CIC co-produced with
Centre Georges Pompidou
The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...
from Paris and
Museum Ludwig
Museum Ludwig, located in Cologne, Germany, houses a collection of modern art. It includes works from Pop Art, Abstract and Surrealism, and has one of the largest Picasso collections in Europe. It holds many works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lic ...
from Cologne the firs internet video archive of new media art
Andre Iten was also the first to invite curator Simon Lamunière to do exhibitions with video and photography as well as to challenge digital media, websites and cd roms. The long term collaboration with the curator between 1989 and 2004, led to major changes in perception of what was called video art or digital media, and led to renaming the "International Video week" as "Biennial of Moving Images" and the creation of a second biennial devoted to digital culture.
In 1994, the biennial "Version" focussed on the evolution of society and digital media. CD-roms were edited and first websites produced. In 1997, as curator of th documenta X website Simon Lamunière commissioned several internet projects with artists
Matt Mullican
Matt Mullican (born September 18, 1951) is an American artist and educator. He is the child of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. Mullican lives and works in both Berlin and New York City.
Early life and education
Matt Mullican was bo ...
Martin Kippenberger
Martin Kippenberger (25 February 1953 – 7 March 1997) was a German painter, draftsman, photographer, sculptor, installation and performance artist. He became known for his prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction, as w ...
,
Antoni Muntadas
Antoni Muntadas (born 1942 in Barcelona) is a postconceptual multimedia artist, who resides in New York since 1971. His work often addresses social, political and communications issues through different media: such as photography, video, text and ...
, jodi, Heath Bunting, Herve Graumann in coproduction with the CIC.
The Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine also gained attention by constituting the most important Swiss media library with more than 1000 titles, including complete video works by
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an American performance art, performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performan ...
, Hanspeter Ammann,
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born June 5, 1947) is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting,Amirkhanian, Cha ...
,
Emmanuelle Antille
Emmanuelle Antille (born 1972) is a Swiss video artist, film director, and educator.
Biography
Emmanuelle Antille, born in Lausanne in 1972. She completed her studies at the Geneva University of Art and Design in 1996, and the Rijksakademie v ...
,
Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović ( sr-Cyrl, Марина Абрамовић, ; born November 30, 1946) is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limit ...
and
Ulay
Frank Uwe Laysiepen (; 30 November 1943 – 2 March 2020), known professionally as Ulay, was a German artist based in Amsterdam and Ljubljana, who received international recognition for his Polaroid SX-70, Polaroid art and collaborative performan ...
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Initially a paint ...
, René Bauermeister,
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and Tragicomedy, tra ...
Robert Breer
Robert Carlton Breer (September 30, 1926 – August 11, 2011) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.
Life and career
Born in 1926, Breer began his artistic career as a painter after studying at Stanford University an ...
,
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
,
Claude Closky
Claude Closky (born 22 May 1963) is a French artist who lives and works in Paris.
Reception
Closky won the "Grand prix des Arts plastiques" (1999) and the Marcel Duchamp Prize (2005) awarded by the ADIAF.
Dike Blair wrote in ''Artforum'' Ma ...
, Douglas Davis, Sylvie et Chérif Defraoui, Jan Duyvendak,
Harun Farocki
Harun Farocki (9 January 1944 – 30 July 2014) was a German filmmaker, author, and lecturer in film.
Early life and education
Farocki was born as Harun El Usman FaroqhiMargalit Fox (3 August 2014)''New York Times''. in Neutitschein, which is n ...
,
Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou (17 January 1926 – 2 December 1987) was a French artist associated with Fluxus, who produced works as a filmmaker, action poet, sculptor, and happenings maestro.
Life
In 1943, Filliou became a member of the French Communis ...
,
Oskar Fischinger
Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger (June 22, 1900 – January 31, 1967) was a German-American abstract animation, abstract animator, filmmaker, and painting, painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of co ...
Jochen Gerz
Jochen Gerz (born 4 April 1940) is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, parti ...
, Joe Gibbons,
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard ( , ; ; 3 December 193013 September 2022) was a French and Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the French New Wave film movement of the 1960s, alongside such filmmakers as ...
Lothar Hempel
Lothar Hempel (born 1966 in Cologne) is a German artist based in Berlin. He attended Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1987 to 1992.
Artistic practice
Hempel transforms the exhibition space into a stage on which the visitor becomes an actor in a st ...
,
Gary Hill
Gary Hill (born April 4, 1951) is an American artist who lives and works in Seattle, Washington. Often viewed as one of the foundational artists of new media art, based on the single-channel work and video- and sound-based installations of the 1 ...
,
Thomas Hirschhorn
Thomas Hirschhorn (born 16 May 1957) is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris.Randy Kennedy (June 27, 2013)Bringing Art and Change to Bronx''New York Times''.
Trained in Zurich and inspired by Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, he began as a gra ...
William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. He is especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s, constructed by filming ...
Avi Mograbi
Avi Mograbi (; born May 9, 1956) is an Israeli documentary film, documentary filmmaker.
Life and career
Mograbi's grandfather founded Cinema of Israel, The Mograbi Cinema ''(Kolnoa Mograbi)'', an Art Deco movie theatre in downtown Tel Aviv. Opened ...
, Gianni Motti, Jean Otth,
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...
, Jean Painlevé, Artavazd Pelechian,
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Elisabeth Rist, birth name ''Elisabeth Charlotte Rist'' (born 21 June 1962 in Grabs) is a Swiss visual artist best known for creating experimental video art and installation art. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abst ...
, Carole Roussopoulos, Daniel Schibli,
Richard Serra
Richard Serra (November 2, 1938 – March 26, 2024) was an American artist known for his large-scale Abstract art, abstract sculptures made for Site-specific art, site-specific landscape, urban, and Architecture, architectural settings, a ...
Nelson Sullivan
John Nelson Sullivan (March 15, 1948 – July 4, 1989) was an American videographer who chronicled life in Downtown Manhattan’s arts and club scene from 1983 until his death. His hundreds of videos documented daily life in the city, nights o ...
Bill Viola
William John Viola Jr. ( , ; January 25, 1951 – July 12, 2024) was an American video artist whose artistic expression depended upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human ...
William Wegman Ingrid Wildi, Bob Wilson, Anna Winteler.
The CIC was shut down after Andre Iten's death in 2008, and its mission transferred in 2010 on one hand to the
Centre d'art contemporain
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricity ...