New Delhi, July 21 - Video Wednesday, one of the biggest exhibitions of video art in the country spread over a year, will close with a digital blitz in the capital during July 29-Aug 1. It has featured video works by over 60 artists.

Since July 2008, the capital-based Gallery Espace has dedicated every Wednesday to the promotion of video art with shows and accompanying lecture sessions as part of an outreach programme.

Video Wednesday was curated by art critic JohnnyML.

The experimental video art started making inroads in the country around 2000 with the digitisation of the media.

It has come of age now with nearly 80 percent of the young artists using the video as a tool to express themselves creatively. Buyers are also expressing interest in this genre because the videos are 'cheaper than mainstream art' and are portable.

Prices of video art range between Rs.5,000 and Rs.300,000, say dealers and those working in galleries.

Video art, it is said, took off as a genre when the Korea-born American artist Nam June Paik used his new Sony Portapak (video) camera to shoot the footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York city in the autumn of 1965. The same day, Paik played his tapes at a Greenwich village cafe. And it became video art.

'The market for video art in India is mostly young and up-end. Most of the buyers, who are upwardly mobile professionals, have state-of-the art television sets or projection facilities at home to screen the videos. The idea behind Video Wednesday was to acquaint local audiences with and encourage them to see works by artists from India and abroad. I have even sold my works,' Renu Modi of Gallery Espace told IANS.

Video has been one of the most popular visual mediums since the advent of VHS tapes, players and recorders in the Indian market during the mid-1980s, said JohnnyML, project curator of Video Wednesday.

'But video as a means to screen digital art has taken time to capture the imagination of the people and the artists -- at least two decades.