Video

2008, 5 minutes 30 seconds, color, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
sound collage: Phill Niblock

"Four-Wheel Drive" is the single-channel screening version of a 4 projection video-audio installation piece. The work presents a double détournement of contemporary common technology. It reframes visual and sonic properties of automotive technology into artistic content by way of surveillance technology. Recordings by a surveillance camera of images, and by a high quality microphone of sounds, of the movement of wheels (tires) of a moving car on different types of road surfaces explore the "musicality" and visual and tactile qualities of motion in relation to the motor vehicle. They form an immersive environment where different channels of sound interact with each other, with the space, and with the extreme close-up footage of the wheels and roads and become, by virtue of the large scale presentation, huge tactile textured abstract moving images evoking gigantic floating hyperreal color-field paintings.

2006, 24 minutes, color, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
music: Al Margolis (IF, BWANA)

Take-off originated with a musical work-in-progress that composer Margolis proposed to video artist Liberovskaya as a point of departure for a collaborative piece. Margolis's drone evoked for Liberovskaya a series of images which she shot and began to put together. From this point on, over some 12 months, both the music and video evolved in additions and substractions, at times in reaction to one another, at times on their own. The piece is thus the result of a back-and-forth dialogue between image and sound where flying machines flutter and flying creatures rumble in flickering bombinating juxtaposed layers.

Take-off can be, and has been, shown as a single-channel work (in a version with a title and credits) or as an installation (in an auto-looping version with no credits or titles).

2006, approx. 10 minutes, color, stereo

video & audio: Katherine Liberovskaya

Produced within the context of the Trinity Square Video, Toronto, and Videographe, Montreal, run 2005-2006 Themed Commission Program as part of a trilogy called Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité where for each of the three themes six artists were commissioned to create a new video work. In response to the theme of Fraternity, Katherine Liberovskaya recorded, over the summer of 2006, her travels across the borders of France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, as well as the Canada - U.S. border. The resulting video, Boderline Fraternity, reflects on NAFTA and the European Union as symbols of political fraternity or fellowship and the conflict between national and pan-national identity in the global economy.

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
music: "Hurdy Hurry" by Phill Niblock from Touch Works for Hurdy Gurdy and Voice, 2000 Touch Records

This tape was made with the Montreal (Canada) action/abstract painter Graham Cantieni for a special event in honor of his retirement from the function of Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Quebec in Three Rivers where he taught since the '80s. With the help of a miniature surveillance camera, approximately the size of a lipstick, which was fastened to the hand of the artist while he painted, the video presents the point of view of the paint-brush during Cantieni's creative process. Brush stroke after brush stroke, the painting emerges in all its texture and physicality, abstract and palpable, to the minimal drone music of NY intermedia composer Phill Niblock which Cantieni invited to participate. Based on a collaborative concept by Liberovskaya, Niblock and Cantieni...

2003-2004, 103 minutes, color, stereo

by Katherine Liberovskaya

2003-2004, video installation for one monitor or one projection, 103 minute loop

A dynamic portrait composed from fragments of seventy (+ 1) extremely close-up interventions on video about intermedia composer Phill Niblock by seventy (+ 1) people connected to him in some way. These interventions, or monologues, were collected in honor of his seventieth year (2003-2004) and the piece has been completed in time for his 71st birthday, October 2nd 2004.

With: Chris Anderson, Thomas Ankersmit, Jeff Bauer, David Behrman, Tara Bhattacharya, Maria Blondeel, Krystyna Borkowska, Jens Brand, Tom Buckner, Yu-Fei Chen, Steve Dalachinsky, Irina Danilova, Guy De Bièvre, Micheal Delia, John Duncan, Jean Dupuy, Angie Eng, Dan Evans Farkas, Esther Ferrer, David First, Bernhard Gal, Dave Geary, Madeleine Gekiere, Malcolm Goldstein, Annie Gosfield, Matt Griffin, Shelley Hirsch, Andrea Hull, Tom Johnson, Seth Josel, Tomi Keranen, Roger Kleier, Hans W. Koch, Yumi Kori, Mary Jane Leach, Okkyung Lee, Katherine Liberovskaya, Alan Licht, Chris Mann, Frankie Mann, Al Margolis, Eric Mattson, Charlie Morrow, Boris Nieslony, Morgan O'Hara, Yuko Otomo, Paul Panhuysen, Vitaly Patsyukov, Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, Matt Rogalsky, Jurgita Remeikyté, Don Ritter, Ursula Scherrer, Claudia Schmacke, Micheal Schumacher, Shelly Silver, Jim Staley, Gerd Stern, Volker Straebel, Elaine Summers, Micheal Timpson, Yasunao Tone, Jo Truman, Keiko Uenishi, Ruben Verdadeiro, David Watson, Monika Weiss, Anne Wellmer, Amnon Wolman, Dion Workman, Nina Zaretskaya.

It is worth noting that the choice of participants was a much more incidental than pre-determined process, except for the goal of reaching a total of seventy. Each was invited to briefly say anything they wanted to, or to express themselves in any way they like, about Niblock -- within the constraints of a very tight shot of their face. The result is an intimate collage of meditations, reminiscences, anecdotes, stories, impressions, feelings... from seventy one different angles: seventy (one) sides of Phill Niblock.

1999 - 47 min. - color + b & w - stereo - without dialogue

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Slava Egorov/Tikhon

"A Scratch Y2K Hush-Song: Silences, Secrets & Games" is an entirely visual commentary on the current state of the planet as it prepares for the over-mythified and over-mediated transition to a new millenium. A long lullaby for a crying newborn, this hybrid "scratch" collage sets off from the tender and peaceful universe of nursery songs on a vast panoramic tour of ever more secret, hidden and hushed dimensions of contemporary humanity, to form a mediated musical lament for future generations.

1997 - 73 min. - video - color & sepia - stereo in Russian with English sub-titles

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Slava Egorov

Between travelogue and experimental non-fiction, RUSSIAN SOUL-SEARCHING is a very personal attempt by the Canadian-born Russian video artist, Katherine Liberovskaya, to uncover the enigma of today's "Mysterious Russian Soul". It is the outcome of a long quest that took her from the reminiscences of her family to the country of her ancestors, where she went for the first time after the 1991 "poutch", and where she spent some 6 months with a video-camera in 1994. Juxtaposing over 40 intimate conversations with Russians of all ages from the most varied walks of life with an impressionistic panorama of unique visual footage this poetic journey-essay strives to span a bridge between the cultural reality of present day Russia with the Russian cultural heritage that the artist inherited from her grand-parents and parents growing up in Canada.

1996, 26 min., color + b & w, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Slava Egorov

EPHEMERIS is a video journal that covers the year 1995, from January to December. This contemplative work closely follows the seasonal changes of the North American wilderness.

"A journal of those little things, of months, of seasons, of changes, of those fleeting moments, elusive, that disappear in the instant of becoming, that make up the year."

1993 - 22 min. - color - stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Pelthead International Conspiracy Theory

XXII is a contemplative and hypnotizing visual tale inspired by the divinatory Tarot. By associations, suggestions and metaphores the videogram takes a contemporary look at the symbolism of the traditionnal cards. The 22 major arcana compose a complex narrative structure of 22 episodes where the lives of 22 characters interconnect through a choreographic counterpoint of cards and destinies. This work combines sophisticated 3-D computer grahics with video.

1990 - 11 min. - color - stereo - no dialogue - text in French & English

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Nathalie Fortin

One by one
straight from the supermarket
carefully selected
they appear :
an answering machine
a television set
a vacuum cleaner
a microwave oven
AND MORE...

each one,
a fragment of the Silent Message
each one,
yet another part
of the Last Gift
which designs
the Definitive Farewell...

1990, 7 min., color, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Kenton Türk

Berlin, February 1990. A visual travelogue composed of images taken haphazardly with a hi-8 camera during walks along border sites - that for the most part no longer exist - of the two sides of the then still divided city.

1989, 1 min 57 sec., color, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Rémy Leclerc

An audio-visual vignette about happiness where the four elements earth, air, fire and water - as well as duration, the video medium itself and a turtle come together to create a virtual mandala in real time.

1989 - 13 min. - col. + b. & w. - double mono

video: Katherine Liberovskaya
original soundtrack: Roy Reynolds

A piece about identity and belonging. Frozen Ink reflects the struggle to determine personal identity in a world that striving to define its subjects through statistic specifications in questionnaires such as: language... mother tongue...nationality... qualifications... occupation... It contrasts the complexities of lived experience with the impersonal demands of the information age.

From blank to blank, a visual poem unfolds, through the vast white territory of the empty spaces, the dotted lines, left behind by those familiar cage-words: name...address...date of birth...occupation... that pursue us all along our lives. From blank to blank, questions seek answers, answers question questions, while suspension points punctuate frozen time.

1988, 7', color + b & w, stereo

video: Katherine Liberovskaya with Pascale Malaterre
original soundtrack: Michel Smith

Using the language of visual and oral poetry, this work examines postmodern domination. Looking to the past and to the future, all it finds is anonymous genealogy and uncertain continuity. It proposes the pure and simple forms of gesture, touch, voice and sight as sites of resitance and survival.