Judith Barry Tribute at Athens Digital Art Festival

Tribute to Judith Barry
Athens Digital Art Festival, Athens Greece
May 23 – 26, 2024

Part of the “Women In Video Art” Tribute series.

In its twentieth edition, the Athens Digital Arts Festival, honoring its roots and identity, paid tribute to the pioneering women of video art and digital arts. Over the years, the festival has focused on female creators, aiming to highlight their work and their impact within this predominantly male-dominated field. Thus, there couldn’t be a more fitting tribute for its anniversary edition. The festival showcased works from a range of highly significant creators who have left their mark on the history of art, in a room specially dedicated to the female perspective in video art. In addition to Judith Barry, Shigeko Kubota and Pipilotti Rist, were featured in the Tribute Room as well as many other women artists throughout the festival.

All the light that’s ours to see, Judith Barry, ADAF Festival, Athens, Greece 2024, Installation view.

About the work:

Judith Barry, All the Light That’s Ours to See (2020), two-channel installation, 19:00 mins.

About Mr. Kim’s video stores…please view the monitor.

All the light that’s ours to see is an elegiac meditation on our changing viewing habits and how we are being transformed by the evolving forms of media surrounding us. The displacement of Mr. Kim’s infamous New York video stores and his quest to find a home for his 55,000 films is the catalyst for this two-channel installation that explores how architecture, the long history of technological inventions, as well as art and media histories, have affected us and the ways in which we engage with media, and by extension with each other.

Visually, this project is a palimpsest of images presented across two screens that cinematically interrogates viewing spaces from the medieval period to present-day media environments. The physical array of the cinematic surround and its location-specific installation allows the viewer to slip between these historical moments and question the changing social situations they have encouraged, alongside the relationships among lost media histories, and eve-evolving emerging audience behaviors.