Singing to Janis Joplin until you almost pass out, hyperventilating on camera and generating electricity for hours on end all sound like difficult ways to pass the time. What is it with a current crop of artists seemingly doing their upmost to pass massive feats of endurance for our viewing pleasure (or alarm as the case may be)?

The third Artists Film Festival, which opens at the Pelorus Trust mediagallery on Friday 11 April, provides a snapshot of artists’ use of the video medium. The results, hinted at above, are both astonishing and mesmerising, thought-provoking and often just downright weird. Curated by Wellington-based curator and art writer Paula J Booker, this collection of work is surely the largest artist video show ever undertaken in New Zealand.

Featuring 28 artists from around the country Booker explains, “This show was designed to profile the work of artists from photographers, sculptors, to sound artists and even VJs, who may not exclusively make ‘video art’ as part of their art practice. The usual suspects who are already well-known for their video installations have an audience, so I wanted to bring some new voices to this show.”

“There is no specific umbrella theme for the festival – “artists’ video” is the theme and artists have really enjoyed having the freedom that the brief allowed. It’s been very interesting for me to spin out the nuances and themes from the works that have come in.”

Booker says that while many works use moving image to create visual narratives, many of the artists’ works “are concerned with recording performance art. While I noticed this trend in many of last year’s work, this year there is more of a tendency towards what I call ‘endurance performance’”.

Booker stresses “even amongst this sub-group within the festival, each work has different politics and aims.” For example, visitors will wonder what Murray Hewitt is up to in Weeping Waters, relentlessly kicking a soccer ball up a giant sand dune. It seems frustrating but if you watch the work over time, it is quite hypnotising and you can pick up the subtleties of his symbolism. Fiona Gilmore investigates what happens when the emotional posturing of pop music collides with performance in art making.

In One Hour Janice, the artist mimes a performance by Janice Joplin again and again. She is searching for an authentic performance of the musician and is trying to bring emotion to her piece of art. In Soda Diary Campbell Paterson samples soda from his parents fridge, each day drinking enough to experience its effervescence quite violently, testing his physical limitations.”

Booker was a founding director of Canary Gallery, a small artist run space in Auckland that hosted the inaugural Artist’s Film Festival in 2005. She says that was a comparatively low-key affair, but the format and the work was interesting, so it garnered a lot of interest for the idea of an Artists Film Festival.

The Film Archive’s mediagallery is the only dedicated moving image space in New Zealand. Unlike other exhibitions of time-based art, viewers don’t have to wait for a specific work to finish to see what interests them, they can self-select a video from the huge menu of works, and see it projected large-scale on the wall. The comfortable surrounds of the Archive’s mediagallery, mean visitors will probably stay all afternoon catching up on exciting new art.”

This year involves nearly twice as many artists as last year’s AFF. The majority of the videos have been made in 2007 and 2008 and Booker points out the works are extremely disparate. The show also features some compelling works, such a film noir adventure shot at Artspace in Auckland, and a feminist mockumentary about local artists, a picturesque video that engages with traditional landscape painting and an Antiques Road Show spoof.

Mediagallery Manager Mark Williams has found artists are excited by the scale and opportunity of the project and he hopes the AFF becomes a fixture in the visual art calendar. "It probably won't reach the size of Sundance or Tribeca but I would like to see this Festival becoming a brand like any other film festival - artists should want to be in it, and audiences should look forward to discovering who's hot in this years art-meets-moving image scene"

The exhibition also features the New Zealand premiere of Johannes Contag’s video work The Twilight Drone which has a commercial DVD release in Europe later this year. He will be performing live on Thursday 17 April at 7pm with the projection of this piece, the third installment in Contag’s SLEEPYTIME series. While the previous releases were music albums, containing hypnotically slow, minimal and at times meditative pieces of instrumental music, The Twilight Drone is a musical film.

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List of artists and works in the exhibition

ARTLESS + Frey (WGTN) ‘Artist’ Tracey Moffatt / Gary Hilberg (ARTLESS / Frey Video Noir Re-edit) 2008 (02:33)

Kah Bee Chow (AK) Reverence 2008 (06:54)

Campbell Farquhar (AK) Living Room Fort 2006 (03:47)/ 5 second exposure 2006 (03:56)

Sandy Gibbs (WGTN) Man Action #1 2008 (01:30)

Fiona Gilmore (AK) Superman 2007 (09:00) / One hour Janice 2007 (cinema only)(48.00)

Eve Gordon (AK) Lively Lovely  (02:50)

Eve Gordon / Sam Hamilton (AK)  Pixel Dust 2006 (07:41)/Equatorial Thoughts: Scaled and Phasing 2007 (02:48)

Murray Hewitt (WGTN)    Untitled 2007 (01:37)/ Weeping Waters 2007 (10:15)

Colin Hodson (WGTN)Snow 2008 (00:58)/ Palace 2006 (02:36)

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith (WGTN) pod 2008 (03:55)

Andrea Low  (AK) You’ll Know When You Get There 2007 (10:34)

Maia Macdonald (WGTN) Lucy 2007 (11:20)

Jennifer Mason (AK) Desire and Pain 2004 (14:00)

Clare Noonan (WGTN) Loop Track (from Pilgrim Tourist) 2007 (07:00)

Rachel O’Neill    (WGTN) Ahead of time 2007 (04:50)

James Oram (CHCH) Self Generating 2007 (04:10)

Campbell Patterson (AK) Soda Diary 2007 (03:28)

Kim Pieters (DN) stray 2005 (22.02)/ nightwatch of the mirror 2006 (09:08)/ checkpoint 2006 (10:32)

Martyn Reynolds (AK) Waikato Plains - Friday Evening 2008 (08:00)

Johanna Sanders (WGTN) Oops! 2008 (01:10)

Marnie Slater (WGTN) ELI and JACK 2008 (29:08)

Nathan Thompson (DN) FUGUE 2007 (01:00)

Daryll Walker(WGTN) Oranges 2006 (04:10)

Peter Wareing (NEW PLYM) (D-2) 2007 (04:13)/ Funny Has Nothing To Do With It 2006 (06.00)/ Faith Based Initiatives Group 2006 (04.00)

Tao Wells (WGTN) Kids on rocks, kids on drugs 2007 (10:58)/ Splash face in puddle 2007 (03:22) I see you, you see me 2007 (05:58)

Fats White (AK) Goodnite Norma Jean Blues 2006 (02:00)

Giles Whittaker (WGTN) bg5 2007 (06:52)/ lmb 2007 (05:39

Erica van Zon (AK) An Antiques Roadshow future (01:30) 2008/ ARS 2CV (02:00) 2008