At last fall's Venice Biennale, for example, nearly every pavilion had at least one, and frequently several, video works on display. Given the massive scale of the Biennale, the effect of these hours of footage was overwhelming. Who has the time and patience to sit through all this, some visitors wondered, and why isn't this just filmmaking?

MIT's "Tele-Journeys," an exhibition on view at the List Visual Arts Center (through July 7, 2002), doesn't really answer either question, though it has its fascinating moments nevertheless. All but one of the nine artists in the show is represented by video-based works, ranging in length from a couple of minutes to more than an hour and a half. Viewing every minute of every work in the show would take the better part of a day.

Compared to the radical dislocations of video pioneers like Naim June Paik, who transformed TV monitors into bras and fish tanks and distorted TV test patterns with heavy magnets, the works in "Tele-Journeys" are visually tame. Instead of challenging the nature of the medium, they work within its traditional boundaries, using familiar techniques like narration, fades, slow motion, and voice-overs.

For this far-flung international group, which includes artists born in Mexico City, Seattle, Jerusalem, Osaka, Dhaka, Pekan Baru, and Comodoro Rivadavia, two related themes, politics and identity, seem especially important. Most of the participants now live in Western Europe. Their videos are filled with loss, dislocation, and the effects of being part of a diaspora on multiple levels.

Fiona Tan's moving "May You Live in Interesting Times" (1997) is emblematic of the show's anxious content. Daughter of an Indonesian father of Chinese origin and an Australian mother whose ancestors came from Scotland, Tan's film documents her search for her Chinese family scattered in the 1960s during Indonesia's genocidal persecution of its Chinese minority.

Tan's work is full of bizarre juxtapositions: a Chinese wedding in Indonesia, lavishly produced in Western style with white satin wedding gown and a huge white cake; Tan's Chinese-Indonesian relatives dressed in traditional Dutch costumes ("I think of myself as more Dutch than Chinese," one of them says); another relative, persecuted by the Cultural Revolution after she fled Indonesia for China, proudly recounting her admission to the Communist Party; and finally a very European-looking Tan, at her ancestral home in China, surrounded by hoards of her Chinese cousins.

Much of the film's effect comes from Tan's bewildered commentary: "I could never live here," she complains in her ancestral village. "I will never feel Chinese or Western.... I have an identity defined only by what it is not.... I am a professional foreigner." A young Chinese man she interviews comments: "You are not Chinese, because you have a big nose." Nothing is resolved or clarified or even defined. "It started off as a search," Tan says of her project. "Now I am in search of my search."

In "Travel Agency" (2001), made by German-born Nabila Irshaid, the search is for her father's non-existent homeland in Palestine. Pieced together from Super-8 footage shot during a 1970s family trip to Israel and the occupied territories, the innocent images are undercut by Irshaid's self-consciously acid commentary.

Michael Bloom looks for the relevance of Karl Marx in post-Marxist hyper-consumer culture. Shot at a nearly deserted, off-season resort in the Rockies, his "Wandering Marxwards" (1999) shows the artist reading a paperback edition of "Das Kapital" while working out in the gym, soaking in a hot tub, and lounging near a bank of telephones. Again, Bloom's lethargic but ultimately unsettling voice-overs are the most powerful part of the piece. Carlos Amorales' "Amorales vs. Amorales" (1990-2001) is actually a series of videos, documenting the artist's long obsession with Mexican luche libre-wrestling, a form of staged wrestling akin to the American "professional" variety. But here the wrestlers wear bizarre masks and live in a half-fictionalized world of superhero fame, fighting for the rights of the oppressed against drug dealers and evil landlords. "They experience both an ordinary life and a heroic one," Amorales proclaims on a wall in the exhibition. "Both lives are to be separated but often the boundaries are confused."

Artist-curator Joan Jonas' selection for "Tele-Journeys" is not entirely representative of international video art. The main inspiration in most of these videos are films, especially ones by auteurs like Sergey Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Goddard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who combine politics with a surreal ambiance in their works. For example, Runa Islam's "Tuin" (1998) is a direct restaging of a moment in Fassbinder's 1973 film, "Martha." The 1960s tradition of performance-based video art is obliquely represented in Bloom's "Wandering Marxwards" and more directly in the two short works by Israeli artist Yael Bartana. For the most part however, the videos in this show are slickly and professionally produced, with little of the raw amateurism of '60s video experiments.

Perhaps "Tele-Journeys" suggests that the old media of painting, drawing, sculpture, and prints are no longer satisfying, no longer relevant to the jittery, noisy, media-savvy flow of contemporary life. Most of the works in the show would not look out of place in an independent film festival. The gallery setting seems largely calculated to give them a slightly higher status as "fine art."

Despite an occasional awkward self-consciousness, the engrossing themes and strong narrative force of these pieces makes them absorbing and provocative to watch. But their force and focus are more narrative and literary than visual. Do they really belong in an art gallery? Or are they exotic invaders in the domain of visual art?

The "Tele-Journeys" exhibition is on display at MIT's List Visual Art Center through July 7, 2002.

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