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Video Art and the Decline of "(High)story"

KHAHLISO MATELA

Creative Non-Fiction and Video Art

Originally Published: 19 December 2025

“The word "history" came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more "History," but only "Imagery" or "Videory."”

 — Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter (1972)

“We live in an age where truth is constructed from images, not from facts.”

— Simon Fujiwara

As we live in a post-narrative conditionnot the end of storytelling, but its overflow into new forms—stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought. Through video art, I undertake journeys into the limits of our perception and imagination, triggering images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new realities and the self-involved thoughts transformed into surreal playgrounds.

 

It is often said that a document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images, such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts. But my video poems are NOT fact-based as much as they deal with the hyperrealities of the mind conjuring their self-destruction and re-assimilation in the real and natural realm. These video poems are an interplay between deliberation and intuition in art practice.

 

I begin first by dissecting and reassessing the unofficial history of imagery as found in sculptures, mosaics and buildings; unfolding those lesser-told layers of its vibrant evolutions until contemporary manifestations. Memories and their counter-memories are fragments upon which I construct visual interpretations not bound by traditional definitions or criteria for artistic representation, but used as a lens that looks at both personal and collective memories. My video art therefore is a porous network of cultural dialogue and engagements, and it stems from an insane and very profound distrust of imagery, which in turn roused the need for orality and, at times, textualisation of narratives in most of my projects. Through the use of “hijacked” images from popular culture, mainstream movies and publicity materials, the forensic-poetic work is affirmed by inner questions raging from faces of nameless objects and individuals reduced to symbols.

The underlying critical question is: what can the art imply for life through suspension of genre-specific boundaries and redefining a new synthesis of the disciplines that explore the collective, the ephemeral, the occasional and yet psychotic engagement with a traumatising world? These video artworks are hence articulated as material testimonies to trauma, using cinema as the language of conflict, to expunge history from corruption.

Video art has always been a way to express different forms of resistance to dehumanisation and interrogate the social fascination with memory erasure. It contemplates the conditions of collective amnesia, where the marginalised and nameless, embrace their fluid identities through multiple possibilities of narratives. This gelatine-based pathway into dreams, recognises the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the archival, and the true in the alienated observations of light shed on obscurities. And “Human" here, is etymologically related to the word "humus," which is soil. This cinematic art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points,’ ambiguities and multiple meanings, less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence,” sometimes utilising technical glitches as tools, and rewriting visual narrative paths in atypical ways.

Rather than follow predetermined paths, video art moves across shifting contours. Layered fictions and shifting realities lead us down unanticipated paths. These appropriated, manipulated images subjected to a series of physical alterations; through the macabre qualities that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious technological society. Blending storytelling with critical and dissenting narratives, video art subverts the polarising structures shaping our understanding of the world and explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time. Video art therefore embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion, juggling a paradoxical dynamic of gazing while being gazed at, offering sensorial testimony to the historical traumas, and the fragile and illusory nature of the social systems we live in.

Video art thrives on glitches and errors that are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly into fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid. Within a contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality, an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality, how do archival images lay claim to representing truth?

Interweaving the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations, video art is a contingent process of creating meaning of identity and collective biography. My video art practice includes appropriating museum collection audio-visually and representing them in a new formulaic symbolism. This allows for an ethical approach to retracing the origins of various voices and images that have been constructed and erased throughout history, bringing the repressed and overlooked to the forefront, inscribing them into the local context, thus opening a dialogue between time, place and history.

The archival artefacts alluded to include sound-based and silent works, yet within which sound is always present—sometimes heard, sometimes only imagined—yet always retaining and relating to partially obscured histories of human reality. The resultant visual experiments recreate visual narratives that draw on stories that resonate with the current resurgence of discourse about archival truisms and heritage preservation. Furthermore, they employ montage to juxtapose appropriated images, generating new meanings, offering a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.

This archive-based video art practice therefore operates at the intersection of cinema and historical research, engaging with heritages of absurd histories and rituals. Practices as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances serve as models for exhibitions: mediated experiences through which audiences access worlds beyond the everyday, connecting these emancipatory practices to contemporary anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements. Video art becomes an ever more refined messenger for a modern world that can be seen beyond appearances. It announces new orders of vision and gives the future something more than an image, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.

Video Art

About the Video Art

In any familiar image lingers a latent yearning for alternative ways in which meaning can be subtly altered and pushed into abstraction. Abstractions are articulated in this video poem as conditions of becoming rather than a fixed state, forcing us to contemplate and look at anew. And even if figures appear in some parts of this continuous flow of images, they are pushed into an abstract and strangely disembodied state. But when interwoven with archival audio, the juxtaposition lays bare links between colonial infrastructure rooted in the dispossession of indigenous land and contemporary conditions of inequality obscured by the illusion of progressive motion towards modernity.

 

The lucid monologues by stalwarts such as Dr. Nthato Motlana and Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, by undermining established patterns of thought ascribed to visuals, invite viewers to explore alternative modes of recalling, a sonic mapping of our present through voices from the past.

 

The past is by no means silent; it is full of sounds that can be rediscovered through research, and these sounds, voices, slogans and hymns simulate the archetypal sounds of revolution, and reveal their psychoacoustic potential for rousing activism in the contemporary mind.

 

UNTITLED #25 thus explores colonial archives, retrieves erased narratives, and proposes new languages of struggle, a grammar of dissidence, which is characterised the struggle for freedmen South Africa.

The Creative

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KHAHLISO MATELA

Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe is a South African writer and filmmaker who uses his craft as a form of social activism and as a means of participating in the collective memory-keeping and creation of the African continent and its diverse communities. Having worked for over a decade in the film and television industry, he has gained extensive experience in both the production and distribution of socially critical and artistically diverse film content. Commonly known as Khahliso, he also expresses his creativity through video art, literature, and experimental sound art. His work has been exhibited on various international platforms, including the Radical Film Network (Berlin) and Quarantine Residency (Shanghai). Matela, who also refers to his practice as that of a video poet, demonstrates a sustained interest in the liminal spaces of visual creativity and continues to produce challenging, psychologically engaging video poems. He is an avid blogger and critical thinker, publishing his writing at anirrationaldiary.blogspot.com.

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