After reviewing most of the most recent Italian video art production, tapping into resources such as the Visual Container platform, the international Magmart video art festival, and the Yearbook video art compendium, the program The Suspended Glance felt the need to broaden its scope and engage with the trends, methods, themes, technologies, and styles of artists working beyond Italy’s borders, specifically in the UK. This was made possible by the involvement of Laura Leuzzi, a contemporary art historian and lecturer at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, who is among the foremost researchers on European video art history, art and feminism, and new media.
The selection she proposes is deliberately varied and does not claim to be exhaustive; rather, it’s like a “sampling” of the infinite possibilities that the nature of video art can offer. Experimentation is what drives artists to use contemporary technological devices in order to translate their inner vision of the world, focusing on pressing contemporary issues such as “decolonization, mental health, the relationship with technology, with nature, and feminisms.”
Curated by Laura Leuzzi
What is video art today? Since its inception, video has been a key medium for artistic experimentation. With constant technological advances, it has evolved into an increasingly flexible and open platform, exploring varied technologies, languages, and artistic forms, including sound, music, and dance.
This selection, without any ambition to be exhaustive, stems from the intention to showcase diverse approaches, themes, technologies, and styles from artists active in the UK or collaborating with UK-based practitioners, highlighting current trends and discussions in this field. Decolonial perspectives, engagement with Nature and technology, traditional culture, inspiration from vintage moving images, feminism, mental health—these are some of the present-day trajectories represented in this curated selection.
Nothing Beside Remains (2023) by Chris Meigh-Andrews revisits the traditional landscape genre, seeking to create a timeless work using the thrilling perspective of a 360° camera, accompanied by Arvo Pärt’s well-known minimalist composition. Meanwhile, sound/performance artist Maja Zećo in In Search of the Sun explores myth from a decolonial viewpoint, opening up reflections on migration and drawing on her personal life story to contribute to a broader dialogue on global movements.
The collaboration between Deniz Johns and Martin Zeilinger in Returning and Turning (2024) fits into the current trend of drawing inspiration from experimental avant-garde film, such as Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1, Louis Lumière’s Danse Serpentine, and Man Ray’s Return to Reason, as well as from the Turnalar Semahı (Semah of Cranes), experimenting with sound, optics, and color.
Guli Silberstein’s Overcome imagines possible dystopian and utopian futures through AI-driven images, examining our ongoing dialectical tension with technology. Aurea by Valentina Ferrandes, using procedural CGI animation, revisits Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, reflecting on the human–nature relationship through a feminist lens.
Lastly, Absentia, directed by Lucia Franci, presents a contemporary screen-dance piece addressing mental health and anxiety, using the camera as an introspective device to delve into our inner world.
A contemporary art historian and curator, Leuzzi is the author of essays and articles in books and exhibition catalogues. Her research focuses on early video art, the history of European video art, art and feminism, and new media. She is co-editor of numerous publications, including REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy (2015), EWVA European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s (2019), and most recently Incite. Digital Art and Activism (2023). She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and events in the UK, Switzerland, and Italy, including Walcheturm (Zurich), Summerhall (Edinburgh), and, more recently, the Over the Real Festival in Lucca, also giving lectures in galleries, museums, and art centers such as Tate Modern, Bozar (Brussels), the British School at Rome, and the CCA in Glasgow. She is co-founder of the online gallery RE_EXHIBIT Rewind. Currently, she is a Chancellor's Fellow at Gray’s School of Art (Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen).
Nothing Beside Remains was filmed at Xlendi Bay on the island of Gozo and was originally presented as a continuous looped sequence for a site-specific installation at Valletta Contemporary as part of the exhibition Meta Landscapes: Representations and Perceptions (Link) from April to June 2022. Shot using a Garmin VIRB 360 camera that captures 360° video in 5.7K, it was mounted on a rotating camera support calibrated to match the viewpoint transition in 360° capture.
The soundtrack features the minimalist piece Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the Mirror) by Arvo Pärt, played by Leonard Roczek (cello) and Herbert Schuch (piano). The title Nothing Beside Remains references Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famed sonnet Ozymandias. Though working with time-based media, Meigh-Andrews aimed to create a work that feels “timeless”—a reflection on a place or moment from which we are absent. The landscape—comprising the sea, sun, sky, clouds, and weathered limestone formations—evokes ancient sculpture fragments left by a forgotten human civilization, thus resonating with the final lines of Shelley’s poem: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Chris Meigh-Andrews is a visual artist, writer, and art historian. Born in Essex (England) and raised in Montreal (Canada) from 1957 to 1975, he entered the sphere of artistic video in 1977, exhibiting his single-channel and installation works widely in both the UK and internationally. In the 1990s, he developed a series of installations combining video with renewable energy. Alongside his art practice, he has pursued an academic career as an art historian and writer. His book A History of Video Art (Berg, 2006; Bloomsbury, 2013) has also been published in Japanese and Chinese. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief (UK & Europe) for the upcoming three-volume Encyclopaedia of New Media Art (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Created during her artist residency at the Aberdeen Art Gallery, In Search of the Sun merges Zećo’s ongoing investigation of migration and representations of migrants’ identities—drawing from her own life experience—with a decolonial approach to visual culture, history, and heritage, emphasizing how migration fosters exchange and cross-fertilization.
The work is inspired by the modernist sculpture Eastre (Hymn to the Sun) by J.D. Fergusson, part of Aberdeen Art Gallery’s collection. Zećo reveals the “foreign” background of the fertility goddess—derived from the Assyrian-Babylonian figure Ishtar—while Fergusson’s depiction is that of a Saxon deity. In the first sequence, Zećo personifies the sacred, interpreting the divinity in its mysterious aura within a primordial cave, while singing Le Coq d'Or Opera – Hymn to the Sun Act II by Rimsky-Korsakov (libretto by Vladimir Bielsky). This evocative soundscape transports the viewer across time and space.
Having “landed” on the Scottish coast, she walks over dunes and along the shore—wearing a gold costume and mask (a tangible reference to the then-current pandemic)—portraying the displacement, struggles, and isolation often experienced by refugees, represented symbolically by the safety blanket/cloak. The ceaseless sound of wind on the shore and the sunlight reflected on her golden cape conjure an immersive environment. Revisiting a recurring theme in her practice, Zećo connects her personal story to myth, performing a ritual culminating in an unveiling of her identity.
Maja Zećo, originally from Sarajevo and based in Scotland since 2015, is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, sound, and moving image. In her research-oriented approach, she addresses questions of identity, decoloniality, and “Balkan futurisms.” This critical exploration has seen her undertake performances such as self-burial, diving, sensory impairment experiments, and endurance pieces. Having completed her practice-based PhD in 2019, she has shown her work in the UK and abroad, including in London, Aberdeen, Zurich, Sarajevo, and Zagreb.
Returning and Turning is inspired by the Turnalar Semahı (Semah of Cranes), an Anatolian Alevi/Bektashi ritual featuring collective whirling, rhythmic footwork, and symbolic hand gestures performed in a circle. The dance loosely references the courtship dance of cranes.
The piece is built upon a single SD video take of a rotating torso, here transformed into an experimental layering of screen spaces, digital color, repetition, and superimposition. Its soundtrack reflects this structure in a live-recorded improvisation sampling contemporary semah music, focusing on the saz (a traditional Turkish instrument). Originally conceived as a live performance, Returning and Turning employs real-time A/V sampling, forging a responsive interaction between image and sound. While materially it experiments with color, optics, and sound, it also carries personal significance: for Johns, it manifests a yearning to reconnect with her family lineage; for Zeilinger, it engages with the cultural heritage of his partner.
Deniz Johns is a Turkish/British artist, researcher, and educator specialized in experimental and expanded cinema. She works with 16mm film, digital video, and live performances. Her interests revolve around the political aesthetics of experimental film and video, and her recent projects explore the negation of imagery as a means of politicizing aesthetics.
Martin Zeilinger explores interdisciplinary and experimental intersections between scholarship, audio-visual artistic research, and curatorship. His interests include sound art, algorithmic/generative art, and improvisation in digital contexts. marjz.net
In Overcome, London-based digital video artist Guli Silberstein imagines potential futures spanning utopia and dystopia, via AI-inspired and AI-generated imagery, highlighting an unrelenting tension between humankind and technology. Themes such as transhumanism, embodiment, power relations, and the bleed between virtual worlds and reality—plus notions of a digital consciousness—are woven into its narrative. As the voice states, “Life is a dream of Time,” hinting at how technology can allow our lives, bodies, and minds to extend across various dimensions.
Overcome relies on a visionary language populated by monsters, devils, and masks, addressing both perceptual shifts and the shape-shifting construction of identity. There is a nod to expressionist painting reminiscent of Ensor or Otto Dix, and their critiques of social classes and power structures. Adopting a storytelling approach, the perpetual morphing and shifting of figures, spaces, and objects is reinforced by an upbeat techno track—Karthago by ORYMA. (LL)
Specializing in VFX, glitch art, and AI, Guli Silberstein has been involved in digital art since completing her MA in Media Studies at New York’s New School in 2001. Her work often addresses the human experience and body within contemporary social and political contexts, using new digital tools to produce original audio-visual forms. She has been widely exhibited and honored at festivals and exhibitions such as the WRO Media Art Biennale (Poland), Transmediale (Berlin), FILE (São Paulo), the London Short Film Festival, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (USA), the Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh), and others. Her digital editions appear on platforms like Sedition Art, LUMAS Galleries, and Artpoint Paris, and her videos are shared frequently across social media, attracting a community of over 250,000 followers and more than 150 million total views.
Aurea is a short CGI procedural animation piece, inspired by the Apollo and Daphne episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, Apollo develops an obsessive love for the nymph Daphne, who has pledged to remain a virgin. While fleeing Apollo in terror, she pleads for rescue from her father, resulting in her transformation into a laurel tree. Aurea revisits and deconstructs Bernini’s 17th-century sculpture, fragmenting it into corpuscular 3D elements that shift into waves of dynamic energy and motion in a continuous cycle of embodiment and disembodiment.
By deconstructing matter and body, the artist counters the male gaze and the objectification of women’s bodies, turning marble into grains of gold. For Daphne, her beauty was a burden she wished lifted: Aurea seeks aesthetic beauty in the tangible elements that make up matter. Ultimately, the piece employs cutting-edge technologies—such as CGI animation—to reflect on central issues of our time: as with similar works, Ferrandes investigates the intricate relationship between humans and nature from a post-natural and posthuman perspective. With a feminist undertone, the work portrays Nature as a safe harbor and companion for humanity—particularly those oppressed—and stands as a reminder of both the climate crisis and the escalation in gender-based violence. (LL)
Valentina Ferrandes is a London-based visual artist from southern Italy. Her work weaves together CGI, procedural animation, and AI-driven storytelling with archival footage, environmental recordings, archaeological findings, and documentary video, constructing speculative narratives that bridge past and possible futures. A finalist for the 2023 Aesthetica Art Prize, former artist-in-residence at Meta’s London HQ (2022), and winner of the Emerging Scene Arts Prize in Dubai, she has worked as a digital experience designer for creative agencies in London and Berlin and has exhibited internationally at festivals such as Visions du Réel, Supernova Animation Festival, European Media Art Festival, and DokuFest.
Absentia is a contemporary screen-dance piece exploring anxiety, emotion, and the mind, written, directed, and edited by Lucia Franci—who produced alongside Francesco Invernizzi and Francesco Tomasi—with cinematography by Massimiliano Gatti. Choreographed by Giulia Menti and powerfully performed by Vittoria Franchina, accompanied by music from Dimitri Scarlato (scored entirely for cello), the film conveys the sensation of being trapped in one’s own mind and body—beyond one’s control—and depicts the clash between external reality and a mental state overwhelmed by anxiety.
In the opening sequence, the protagonist’s arms and legs appear shaken from within, until she’s touched by an unseen rain, signaled by sound design: external sounds like rain and a barking dog mark moments in which she becomes more grounded, easing her anxiety. Then, before an “invisible mirror,” an unsettling figure with a menacing smile appears, symbolizing Anxiety.
Through a musical crescendo, the woman’s agitation builds. She is seemingly imprisoned in a maze, confined by invisible mirrored walls with no exit—until a scream shatters this intangible barrier. In a second sequence apparently set in a real apartment, a man’s smiling hand reaches out, enfolding the lone protagonist in a warm embrace. The nightmare dissolves: the couple is surrounded by friends and black-and-white tones shift into color. The final sequence unveils how she was, in fact, captive to her mind, with the camera’s introspective angle offering a glimpse into her inner self.
Absentia shines a light on crucial topics such as mental health and anxiety, illustrating how video can serve as a tool for introspection and a medium to map our inner landscapes. (LL)
Lucia Franci studied Communication Sciences and Cinema, Television, and Multimedia Production at IULM University in Milan. She began her career as an assistant director and editor in Milan’s documentary sphere, before transitioning to commercial production and joining BRW Filmland Italia as an R&D director and commercial director for eight years. There she studied and collaborated on international directing approaches, working with influential domestic and foreign directors on commercial pitches, and with major agencies like Y&R, Armando Testa, WPP Italy, DDBO, etc. At BRW, she began her career as a director, producing social commercials featuring well-known personalities and, notably, with MTV Italy. This collaboration enabled her to refine her trademark style: “eccentric, international, young, modern, minimalist, but always emotional and visually refined.” Subsequently, she founded an agency and production company with business partner Francesco Tomasi, continuing her journey as an author and creative director.
