Contour 2007 until 21.10. Mechelen, Belgium

Contour 2007 - third biennial for video art has been given the subtitle Decoder. The exhibition presents a number of video and film works in a double-edged line of enquiry. It investigates the perceptual and rhetorical mechanisms that exist which affect and shape how people assimilate their comprehension of the world. Within this investigation it also analyses the contemporary tendencies within lens-based media art practices for looking at the particular issue above, whether self-reflexive or not.

The exhibition is used as a means to touch on subjects that are perceived to be shaped through the prevailing mechanisms for understanding - subjects that are legitimate and candid, topical, revelatory, and even antagonistic. But Contour 2007 also possesses a series of gestures beyond art's current relationship with internationalism. The exhibition looks at the contemporary conditions and desires for consuming through the visual, and questions the capacity for effectively debating socio- and geo-political issues through this consumption. It is not intended to be a political biennial as such. Rather it looks at the means that exist through which we consume political concerns, and then interrogates itself to ask the reason why this act is relevant within contemporary art in the first place.