Mediale

Ian Jones, Food and Drink Editor

Posted 21 December 2020

Mediale, Swinegate Court East, York, Y01 8AJ – Visit Now

York Mediale is an independent arts charity founded in 2014, when York was designated UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts. They deliver a biennial festival, the largest of its kind in the UK. This international arts festival brings together a diversity of artists from around the world and across the disciplines. The focus is on mixed media installations, presented at locations around the city.

Eclectic combinations of video art, projections and digital forms that there aren’t even words for yet

Previous performances have included work from multi-disciplinary dance artist Lydia Cottrell and Can You Die If You Don’t Exist?, a ten and half-hour-long performance and video work chronicling the deaths of undocumented people, conceived by artist Tamara Al-Mashouk in collaboration with Deep Lab collective. Klasien van de Zandschulp and Natalie Dixon’s Good Neighbours project meanwhile took a forensic approach to surveillance by social media.

And that only describes about a tenth of the exhibits and events put on by the festival. Expect these contemporary themes to be reinterpreted afresh each time the festival is produced, through an eclectic combination of video art, projections and digital forms that there aren’t even words for yet.

Their popular current exhibit Human Nature features three immersive works based on life processes, with work from Saatchi veterans Marshmallow Laser Feast, Kelly Richardson and Rachel Goodyear. Marshmallow Laser Feast’s new installation Tides Within Us explores the journey of oxygen around the human body in a series of installations based on natural ecosystems.

The focus is on mixed media installations, presented at locations around the city

York Mediale is a hot ticket for students of media, art and related disciplines, as well as anyone interested in issues of media and technology in the contemporary world.