The event Act Out: Performative Video by Nordic Women Artists is a project from Centre of Art History and Artistic Investigation (CHAIA) of the University of Évora (UE). The CHAIA's researchers responsible for the project are Teresa Furtado, Artist, Assistant Professor of the UE Department of Visual Arts (DAV), with a PhD grant from the Foundation for Science and Technology in Portugal (FCT) for the completion of the thesis "The feminine territories of video art" at the UE and Manuela Cristóvão, Artist, Auxiliary Professor and President of Scientific Commission of Visual Arts-Multimedia Course of the UE DAV. The project collaborators are the curator and artist Anna Linder from Filmform and the UE DAV.
Filmform is an institution dedicated to the promotion, distribution and preservation of experimental film and video in Sweden. The Nordic video art anthology Hit the North, edited by the above-mentioned institution, was one of the inspiration sources for this project. The event is part of the programme of Fike 2008 - Évora International Short Film Festival, taking place from the 21st to the 29th November 2008. The project is sponsored by the Nordic Culture Fund, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, the Swedish Embassy, the Norwegian Embassy, the Danish Embassy and the Finish Embassy in Portugal, Direcção Regional da Cultura do Alentejo, Évora Municipality, Norwegian Seafood Export Council, Cortes de Cima, Hotel Santa Clara in Évora, Diário do Sul, Rádio Telefonia do Alentejo, the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), the international programme of the Visual Arts Fund, a branch of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Konstnärsnämnden) and The Danish Arts Council.
The project Act Out: Performative Video by Nordic Women Artists is part of the DAV investigation line "Art and Society" and the sub-domain "The feminine territory of video art" at CHAIA. This research aims to study the production of video art by women video artists, its reception by the audience and contribution to art history. Performance and video art are two important media that emerged in the 60's and allowed women, until then marginalized by the visual arts' mainstream, to proclaim a place for them that could not be achieved through the western male dominated disciplines of painting and sculpture. Women artists, since then, have created social and political analysis of the structures of patriarchal culture. They have used video to explore their bodies, self and gendered identity, revealing the hidden discourses and ideologies behind them.
The study of the contemporary Nordic women artists' work is indispensable for a complete women's video art research, since their work embraces a wide variety of approaches, contexts and experiences and continues with the questioning of the social and political constructed nature of racial and gender identities in western societies, initiated in the 70s. Nordic women artists practice in performative video includes influential topics in contemporary art debate like power, identity, family, gender roles, transvestism, war and post-colonialism. These issues are brought into their work through a varied range of formal and conceptual strategies of performative video art. Regrettably, their work is scarcely known in the Portuguese cultural domain.
Act Out brings together some of the most significant Nordic visual artists, theorists, academics and curators working in the art field of performative video at the present time. It aims to highlight and illuminate the important contributions from Nordic women artists to video art. The cooperation amongst participants from the implicated countries will result in a key contribution for the knowledge of women's video art, a versatile and politically charged territory that, since its inception, has made a quick transition from the margins to the mainstream of contemporary art practice.
