The VII edition of Bad Video Art Festival will take place at L.A.M.A. (Laboratorio Artistico Multidisciplinare Autogestito), Cosenza, Italy, in December 2024.

The International Bad Video Art Festival (BVAF) is an independent, artist-run initiative. The Festival has been held since 2017. Video artists and B-movie fans Natalia Monakhova and Andrey Slaschilin once decided to explore whether something like bad video art exists. It is well known that B-movies have long since formed a unique cultural niche with their own heroes and fans. In other art sectors, however, the concept of “bad” has not been explored as actively. This year, the BVAF team is collaborating with L.A.M.A.  — Laboratorio Artistico Multidisciplinare Autogestito from Cosenza, Italy. We are looking for videos that are at the intersection of bad art, bad painting, and bad cinema. We propose to study extreme forms of video art and single out certain works as bad videos or “B-videos”. Join us if you are interested in the issue of quality and boundaries in art.

We are looking for works that meet any of the following criteria:

• Technically poor (low resolution, over-/underexposed, unstabilized, wrong focus, poor sound or no sound at all, bad editing, wrong color correction);
• Lacking content (irrelevant, empty, shot just for the sake of it, without any purpose, idea, or concept);
• Consciously/unconsciously exploiting the aesthetics of camp, trash, or B-movies.

When submitting an application, please explain why you consider your video to be bad. There’s no need to send a concept if you have one.
Submission and participation are free (as a non-profit, artist-run initiative, we are unable to offer any screening fees). We do not accept animation, videos made by people under 18, family home videos, or porn. We accept for consideration not more than 3 videos per artist/collective. A video must not be shorter than 1 minute or longer than 10 minutes (if it’s longer but undeniably bad, send us an email explaining why we should accept your video). As this edition is being held in Italy, we kindly ask you to add Italian subtitles if your video contains dialogue in a language other than Italian, or send us an SRT file so we can assist with the translation.