Nan Hoover (1931–2008) made video works where light featured prominently in Amsterdam, where MonteVideo – now LI-MA – began showing and collecting her video in the 1970s. Half a century on, LI-MA cares for her archive on behalf of the Nan Hoover Foundation. This summer her work is in multiple places at once: in the exhibition Pioneers of Media Art at Nxt Museum, and scored live by musicians at a drive-in in upstate New York. How does a body of work stay visible for fifty years?

In Nan Hoover’s work (1931–2008), light is not merely illumination but the very material she wrought, the same way another artist shapes clay or paint. Originally a painter, Hoover went on to work in video, video installation, photography and performance. She often presented these disciplines together, since they share similar points of departure. For her video works she used a simple camera to register barely perceptible movements – of parts of the body, or of surfaces. As these shift, they alter the way light falls on the objects, and with it the colours: a soundless play of light and shadow, of shapes whose boundaries move, of colour fading and intensifying.

The audience, sitting still in the dark, became part of what was being watched – closer, perhaps, to the figures in Plato’s cave, a text Hoover returned to: “Consider nothing more true than the shadows.” Tactile and sensual at once, the artist’s work hangs in the fragile balance between abstraction and the recognisable. In Impressions (1978), a hand moves through a long beam of light: the beam appears to become an object, and the finger appears to paint with light.

Hoover wanted her work to be closely watched in order that nothing should undermine the image; her tapes, as one source says, were opposed to television. When she did use sound, it was intended to serve the image and not to occupy the silence: it was a synthetic tone or a processed distortion. The silence was a deliberate choice, to be made just as deliberately as the use of light.

Nan Hoover and New York

Hoover kept a studio in New York from the mid-1950s and painted through the downtown years of beat poetry, jazz, experimental film, and dance – the loose, noisy scene below 14th Street out of which so much American performance and video art would come. She took up video only after moving to Amsterdam in 1969, when a Sony Portapak arrived in the studio she shared with the artist Richard Hefti. The medium suited her: private, immediate, able to hold time. But she approached it as a painter, and the camera stayed, for her, an instrument no different from a pencil.

That instrument is now being picked up again, in a context Hoover could not have anticipated. On 23 August 2026, the nonprofit arts organisation Wave Farm is staging an event at the Hi-Way Drive-In in upstate New York, where musicians – among them members of TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Animal Collective and Fugazi – each provide a live soundtrack to a silent video artwork. Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio has asked to screen Hoover’s Desert. The other performers are expected to take on works by Dara Birnbaum, Mike Kelley, Sondra Perry and others.

Nan Hoover and Amsterdam

Nan Hoover’s oeuvre is highlighted in the exhibition Pioneers of Media Art, on view at Nxt Museum, Amsterdam. Created in collaboration with LI-MA, the exhibition returns to the first years of MonteVideo, the period in which video first became a working medium for a generation of artists in and around Amsterdam. Hoover belongs to that period, as does Livinus van de Bundt: both came to video from another discipline and gave themselves to it entirely.

Amsterdam is where that turn happened. Hoover had trained and worked as a painter in New York, and it was only after moving to the city in 1969 that she took up video, when a Sony Portapak arrived in her studio. Though she insisted she was a painter – her work, she said, was not media art but “painting with light, time, and movement” – it was here that the painting became something else in her hands. MonteVideo, René Coelho’s pioneering gallery for electronic art, showed and collected her work, and LI-MA counts her today among the founders of video art, alongside Nam June Paik and Bill Viola. Her poetic video works from the 1970s, exploring the limits of light, belong to a generation of early Dutch video that was largely forgotten for years and only rediscovered in the 1990s.

That these works can be shown at all is not a given. Media artworks survive only if they are actively cared for: the equipment ages, formats fall out of use, and without specialist conservation the tapes become unplayable and the work, in effect, disappears. Hoover’s archive reached LI-MA in two parts – the audiovisual material that came to Amsterdam from Berlin, and the large archive whose duty of care the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf formally transferred after the artist’s death. Digitised, documented and kept exhibitable, it is now held at LI-MA.

UNFOLD: What keeps a work in flux?

Pioneers of Media Art historicises this moment, but the works themselves have not stayed fixed in it. LI-MA preserves Hoover’s work to museum standards. On top of that baseline, it explores new ways of presenting, mediating and telling the story of the work: how a piece made decades ago can be shown, and understood, now. In 2021, LI-MA organised the reinterpretation festival UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, which took her oeuvre as its subject and asked what it takes to keep a media artwork open to reinterpretation over time.

UNFOLD is a line of research LI-MA began with the 2016–17 project UNFOLD: Mediation by Reinterpretation, which asked whether reinterpretation, understood as a creative act, could serve as a preservation strategy for media artworks. The question matters because preserving media art is not only a technical problem. Works made with rapidly obsolescing equipment, and works that are variable or performative by nature, resist the object-based methods inherited from the visual arts: it is not enough to keep a work physically available if it can no longer be understood or experienced.

Drawing on the Variable Media Initiative, which placed reinterpretation alongside storage, migration and emulation as a preservation strategy, the project argues that the reinterpretive pressure present in any re-presentation of a work should be met actively rather than suppressed. Reinterpretation does not threaten a work; it animates it, stirring collections and archives into life and inviting artists and audiences to rethink and recontextualise what might otherwise remain static.

Each edition of UNFOLD took a single artist’s oeuvre and invites contemporary artists, students and scholars to reinterpret it, testing what the work can carry when it is remade rather than fixed in the form it first took. UNFOLD: Nan Hoover, held in 2021, was the third such edition. Held on 19 May 2021, the third edition of LI-MA’s reinterpretation programme, it ran live over a single day and remained online for one week. More than ten contemporary artists were invited to perform and present Hoover’s work in unconventional ways and to experiment with hybrid forms.

The programme included a text-based sound installation by multimedia artist Sandra Sterle – a reply to a voice message she had received from Hoover 25 years earlier – a walking performance and multimedia installation by artist Vera Sofia Mota exploring time and movement, a text-based reinterpretation by theatremaker Judith de Joode, and a lecture by Davor Sanvincenti on Hoover’s notation studies and her transposition of visible forms into a new visual language. Students from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (DOGtime), supervised by Willem van Weelden, also took part; Gaby Wijers and dramaturge and writer Fransien van der Putt reflected on their first results in a workshop. In the run-up, on Hoover’s birthday, 12 May 2021, a broadcast of LI-MA Online with Quirine Racké and Helena Muskens discussed her work with her former students and friends, and screened their video portrait My Life as an Artist.

The next viewing

Hoover’s video works are time-bound: light in motion, captured on magnetic tape, dependent on the flicker of a screen and the persistence of a signal to appear at all. Their fragility is not just a matter of age, but of obsolescence: machines decay, formats slip into extinction, and without intervention, the tapes lapse into silence. Every viewing results from a subtle choreography. The audience sees only the surface, unaware of the sedimented choices beneath.

Hoover’s archive arrived at LI-MA in two waves: first, the audiovisual traces from Berlin, then, later, the archival material routed through the Düsseldorf Academie. Now, the collection sits in LI-MA’s care, catalogued on behalf of the Nan Hoover Foundation, while her paintings and drawings find their custodians in Sebastian Fath Contemporary. The minimum expectation is preservation to museum standards, but the real work begins in the friction between conservation and reinvention. Through programs like UNFOLD, LI-MA leans into the challenge of making sense of works decades after their creation, treating reinterpretation not as a dilution but as a vital sign. It is this dual commitment to steady-handed conservation and restless research that allows Hoover’s work to circulate: lent, exhibited, reimagined. Shown at Nxt, flickering at the Hi-Way Drive-In in the summer of 2026, or taken up by more than ten artists in 2021, each iteration is a negotiation with time.

This is how a body of work manages to remain visible, flickering across decades. Hoover is hardly an exception. Each media artwork in LI-MA’s care is subject to the same precariousness, the same lingering uncertainty about whether it can outlast the very materials that once promised its future. This is the predicament of nearly everything conjured with a screen and a signal. The task of keeping these works legible, of making them available to be seen anew, is the quiet labor that defines LI-MA’s existence, for Hoover and for those whose own practices are tethered to this fragile lineage.

Header: Nan Hoover, Impressions (1978). Thumbnail: Nxt Museum x LI-MA: Pioneers of of Media Art opening. Photo by Maarten Nauw.