More and more South African artists are climbing on the video bandwagon, but Conrad Welz has been at the forefront of the genre for many years, writes Lauren Shantall
`It’s about a sensory mind fuck,” says pioneering South African video artist Konrad Welz of his work. No doubt his uncompromising stance played some role in Welz scooping Germany’s much-coveted Bergische Art Prize last year. It’s the first time a video artist has ever won the prestigious award, in a similar league to our Absa Atelier or FNB Vita Art Prize.
Welz first trekked into technoland in the mid-Eighties, when video art was virtually unknown in South Africa and William Kentridge was the only other practitioner. The two were the first to have video art purchased by the South African National Gallery in 1992.
Typical of the times, this very piece, Architecture and Morality – his first serious video, about Eighties angst – was originally screened at a festival in Holland. His depiction of strategic buildings – like the police headquarters where Steve Biko was held – would have had him arrested here.
In 1992 he was one of only 25 students to be accepted by the exclusive Royal Danish Art Academy. After graduating in 1997, he moved to Germany and hit the competitive international video festival circuit – the route, says Welz, for those who are serious about the medium.
Last year he was chosen from 1 200 entrants at the prestigious 44th International Film Festival in Oberhausen as well as being selected for the 11th European Media Art Festival in Osnabruck, Germany. He also made the cut at the BBC British Short-Film Festival in London, and at Videonale 8 – the biennale of the video world -in Bonn, Germany. Just to be selected for these festivals is an achievement in itself.
A self-confessed quality junkie, Welz shoots, edits and graphically manipulates each frame of his punchy videos himself, as well as composing the evocative electronic anthems accompanying his quick-fire streams of imagery.
In recent works like 1995’s Chromacandy, psychedelic parrot/fish/wind/acid/colours shift around irridescent, brightly hued coral. Motion, sound and light meld into a visual and aural epiphany that is nothing less than conceptual candy. Three minutes and 22 seconds transform the viewer into a breathless child let loose in a sweet shop of the senses. Then there’s Adscape 2000 (1998), with its floating, continually looping 3D Panasonic branding, or 1997’s intense 67-second Bhumisparsa – a rapid gush of 80 different faces of Buddha.
“A lot of people tell me that my videos remind them of LSD trips,” Welz laughs enthusiastically, pleased to have made his point. Synesthesia is a major buzzword when he describes his work as attempting to answer the question: “What colour does a sound have, or what sound does a colour have?”
On other levels though, Welz’s oeuvre comments wittily, or darkly, on the techno-fetishism and materialism of pop culture. Technically sophisticated and highly wrought, his experimental pieces are at the forefront of the genre.
For this reason, he’s exhibited extensively in South Africa, France, Copenhagen, Germany and Denmark. In October 1998 he represented the cream of South African talent at the Dreams and Clouds from a New South Africa show in Stockholm, Sweden, and in 1997 he showed at the Fin de Sicle a Johannesburg held in Nantes, France.
All this from an artist who flunked out of electrical engineering, then computer studies, and never even considered pursuing fine art. “Instead of showing in some white cube somewhere” Welz prefers to keep things poppy using his super VHS camera, tripod, sampler and analogue synthesiser to make a music video for South African noise-mongers Battery 9.
His latest work forms part of a groundbreaking Cape Town exhibition called Channel to be held in the pristine rectangular confines of the AVA in March. The show is being co-curated by Gregg Smith and Robert Weinek, who produced the video compilations The Processed Image I and II showcasing contemporary South African video work. Channel aims to expose a relatively video-shy Cape Town to the medium’s hottest proponents. Artists like Peet Pienaar, Stephen Hobbs, Joachim Schonveld, Lisa Brice, Jo Ractliffe, Minette Vari, Malcolm Payne, Francois van Reenen and others will be hitting the proverbial play button on opening night.