Mechelen Videoscape


Installed against historic architecture and in strategically-chosen exhibition spaces throughout the city of Mechelen, Contour 2007, the third edition of the northern Belgian municipality's biennial of video art opened last month and runs through October 21. Featuring new and recent work by some 17 international artists, the exhibition's subtitle, Decoder, references the rhetorical moves that underpin visual perception and suggests that each of the works in the show somehow relates back to these fundamental tricks of comprehension. Among them are a 2007 work by Omer Fast, 'De Grote Boodschap,' which was shot on location in Mechelen, and several performance based single-channel pieces by Tsui Kuang-Yu, an artist who, like the biennial, inserts himself into opportune segments of urban spaces.