DiVA

As attendance grew overwhelmingly at the two spearhead fairs and their principal satellites, the young, hopeful Digital Video Art Fair (DiVA) drew only 2,500 visitors--just over half of last year's showing--as the fair returned to the somewhat remote Battery Park City Embassy Suites Hotel for its third year. Curated once again by dealer Elga Wimmer, the fair was downsized from last year's two-floor presentation to 16 exhibitors occupying a single row of suites on the hotel's fifth floor. DiVA also incorporated 10 off-site installations, shipping containers converted to screening rooms, each designated for a single gallery and parked at the curb on various streets of Chelsea, to capitalize on the audience of gallery patrons.

While prominent New York-based exhibitors seemed to prefer the off-site containers, the Embassy Suites was host to an array of international talents. ShanghArt (Shanghai) showed Yang Fudong's serene, visually rich color film The Half-Hitching Post (2005), following the winding pilgrimage of two parallel parties through the dry, barren hills of Loess Plateau in northern China. NT Art Gallery (Bologna) transformed its suite into a menagerie of video portraits of electrical devices by the Venetian duo Interno3; twitching and ticking, the appliances resemble caged insects within the small black monitors. Ron Mandos (Amsterdam) presented films by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck exploring the politics of family gatherings, including birthday parties, weddings and funerals. <<Rewind<<, the electronic media space of Florence Lynch (NYC), one of the few Manhattan exhibitors at the Embassy Suites, showed Indonesian-born, Amsterdam-based artist Tiong Ang's video Shuttle (From North to South), shot with a handheld camera from the back of a motorcycle struggling through the crowded streets of Yogyakarta.

In a container on 24th Street, Stefan Stux (NYC) screened New York filmmaker Martha Colburn's Meet Me in Wichita, melding iconic characters from The Wizard of Oz with photos of Osama bin Laden; it uses collaged hand puppets and painting-on-glass animation, with Dorothy battling a transgendered bin Laden and the winged monkeys bearing nuclear arms. Tommy Hartung of Moti Hasson (NYC), Molly Davies of Zone: Chelsea Center for the Arts (NYC) and Jonas Mekas of Maya Stendhal (NYC) also screened fims in the containers.

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