Image: David Wojnarowicz, "Untitled from the Ant Series" (eye, ants), 1988-89. Courtesy of PPOW, New York. Website: © 2011 Moving Image, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views, Contributor

Adding to the art fair bustle on Manhattan’s West Side in March will be the inaugural Moving Image, a contemporary video art fair.

Running March 3-6 at the Waterfront Tunnel event space on 11th Avenue, the fair will feature single-channel videos, video sculptures, and larger video installations from an international roster of galleries whose names have not yet been released.

Video, which requires of viewers both time and focus, is not a medium inherently suited to the rushed art fair pace.  Other fairs devoted to video art have come and gone during Armory season. DIVA, devoted to digital and video art, was held in New York from 2005 to 2008.

Moving Image is the handiwork of Ed Winkleman and Murat Orozobekov of Chelsea’s Winkleman Gallery, along with New York dealers Penny Pilkington and Wendy Olsoff of PPOW gallery. Touting an anti-fair formula, organizers promise free entry and a visitor experience “without the confines of booths” or “time and space limitations” of the average art fair.

The event is vetted by a distinguished team including John Connelly (Director of The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation), Zoe Butt (Co-Director of SanArt, Vietnam), Raphael Gygax (Curator at the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich), Kevin McGarry (Director of Migrating Forms, Los Angeles) and dealer Elizabeth Dee.

Dee is co-founder of the nearby Independent, last year’s new and successful fair that garnered much acclaim for its fresh attitude and novel presentation  in Chelsea’s former DIA building.