Kunstverein Nürnberg – Albrecht Dürer Gesellschaft

Sequence II: Collaborative Circuits: Music, Media, Networks
28.02.2026 – 27.03.2026

This three-part video and film program, curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff, brings together moving-image works produced in New York from the 1970s through the early 1990s. Taking its title from Julia Heyward’s collaborative video work “Circuit City,” with music by John Paul Jones and background animations by Ericka Beckman, the program reflects the artistic and political milieu that shaped Heyward’s practice, situating it within a broader landscape of experimental video and performance.

Sequence II sheds light on the dense networks of artistic collaboration across media and genres that shaped downtown New York in the 1980s. The works brought together here span essayistic music films, operatic and theatrical performance formats, and the emerging genre of the music video, which gained new visibility with the founding of MTV early in the decade. Enabled by new distribution networks and expanded technical possibilities for video—including VHS circulation, increasingly accessible editing technologies, and cable television—these works reflect a rapidly intensifying media environment saturated by consumer culture, advertising, and pop imagery. Moving fluidly between day jobs in advertising, music video production, and non-commercial experimental practice, artists navigated and blurred the boundaries between commercial and avant-garde contexts. The resulting works are multilayered and self-reflexive, simultaneously critiquing mass media while appropriating and reworking its visual languages. In doing so, they contributed to a redefinition of video as a hybrid, interdisciplinary medium positioned between art, music, performance, and popular culture.

1. Julia Heyward, „Bay of Pig”, 1986; 4:30 Min.
2. Musikvideo von New Order, Regie: Robert Longo, „Bizarre Love Triangle“, 1986; 4:10 Min.
3. Raphael Montañez Ortiz, „Elvis”, 1990; 6:28 Min.
4. Julia Heyward, „The Visit”, 1993; 1:00 Min.