Video Collection

Close to 800 works (video projections, installations, single-tr acks on monitors), acquired through purchases or State commissions, have entered the Cnap collection since 1972.
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A RICH AND DIVERSE COLLECTION
A collection in its own right within the body of works in the Cnap collection, the Video collection forms a very coherent whole, while reflecting the aesthetic trends occurring in contemporary artistic creation.

It includes works by very young artists (Serge Comte, Claude Closky, Laetitia Bénat, Cyprien Gaillard, Muriel Toulemonde), alongside installations by more established artists (Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Antoni Muntadas, Dennis Oppenheim, Rodney Graham, Thierry Kuntzel). The collection is rounded out with 16mm and 35mm films (Leccia, Matta Clark, Koester).

Systematically purchased since 1972 (Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Gary Hill, Bill Viola) and throughout the 1980s, video entered the Cnap collection en masse in the 1990s. This attests to its recurring presence in the contemporary artistic creation of the last decade (Absalon, Franck Scurti Thomas Hirschhorn, Sadie Benning, Paul Mac Carthy, Rineke Dijkstra, Ange Leccia, Joao Onofre, Bojan Sarcevic, Tacita Dean). With interactive works and digital software on hard drive, the collection moves towards the more specific field of new media.
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A JOURNEY THROUGH THE 20^TH CENTURY
Since the invention of the cinema around 1895, that of television in 1937 and its widespread use from the 1960s onwards, the invention of video and the emergence of the first household VCR in the 1970s, contemporary artistic creation throughout the 20^th century was placed within the broader context of the videographic space, as well as that of the cinema.
An additional element should be put forward in the history of moving pictures: the fundamental role of documentaries and documentary essays in the history of cinema, as well as within contemporary art.

Cinema of exhibition, artist’s films, video installations that place images within space, all attest to the importance of cinema in the imagery of contemporary art, reenacting what had already happened between art and cinema at the dawn of the 20^th century, with the invention of the cinema. Cinema, experimental cinema, video art, documentary essays, cinema of exhibition, artist’s films: these are all parallel stories, to consider for their own sake, establishing no hierarchy, in order to preserve their richness and complexity; they all form the melting pot of “time-based media”, which should be seen as a widespread audiovisual galaxy.
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THEMES IN THE COLLECTION
Several aesthetic themes emerge within the existing collection, such as: “Micro-fictions of the Self”, “Rhetorics of Images”, “Cinema/Cinemas”. Indeed, many contemporary artists choose autobiography as the subject of their video works, making short fictions out of the ‘everyday’. In addition, faced with the world of the media, they have made video the very setting for the analysis of media images and the rhetorical language they convey. Lastly, many video works make references to the cinema and cinematographic languages.

As long-term loans to museums to complete series, or as short-term loans for temporary events, video works are regularly featured in thematic exhibitions.