Paris programme
Thursday 2 November 2023

In 1985 a group of Kurdish fighters, known as a "Peshmerga", on a mission to attack one of the army’s camps in the north of Iraq. They took the Sirwan river by a small raft to cross the area which was controlled by the Iraqi army. This footage is part of an old archive taken by my father Abbas Abdulrazaq, a former Kurdish fighter and cameraman. He accompanied this group of Peshmerga to document their activity during the mission. Despite all the risks they have taken, the battle didn’t happen. Consequently, my father filmed them when they were singing a song. I was very intrigued by his action, so I asked my father why this particular footage never showed before? He mockingly replayed who wishes to watch a film that has no fighting scenes?

Sherko Abbas is a Kurdish-Iraqi artist. He was born in Iran in 1978, where his family lived as refugees. They returned to Iraq when he was two years old. Abbas studied Fine Art in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2015. His work explores sonic and visual memory, with a focus on modern memory that relies on recorded materials. Additionally, Abbas is interested in the current geopolitical situation in Iraq. Abbas’ works have been exhibited and screened internationally including at: Archaic, the Iraq pavilion at the 57th Venice biennale; Theater of Operations, MoMA PS1, New York; May Flames Pave the Way for You, Arsenal gallery, Bia?ystok; Push Festival, Manchester , UK; Towner International, Towner Eastbourne, Eastbourne; Speaking Across Mountains, Middle East Institute, Washington D.C.; Baghdad Mon Amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris; Vernacularity, Alternativa Festival, Gdansk; Estrangement, The Showroom, London. Also, his moving image works were screened at the Independent Iraqi Film Festival's online screening, the 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany, Aashra, Ashkal Alwan Online Film, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin at the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, the Open City Documentary Combined Programme: What Rules The Invisible in London, Visit Festival Het Bos Ankerrui 5-7 in Antwerp, Belgium, Ruya Shop in Baghdad, and Shasha Movies online streaming. Abbas also works as a curator, organizer, and coordinator of cultural events. He was the operations manager for the "Post-war Culture in Iraq" project (2010) and curated the Clamour project (2016). In collaboration with curator Aneta Szy?ak, he researched and coordinated the "In-between Worlds: Kurdish Contemporary Artists" project. This resulted in a collection of artworks from over 30 Kurdish-Iraqi artists and a book. The collection is now part of the Imago Mundi collection under the auspices of the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche in Treviso, Italy.

I come from Ahvaz in southern Iran, the capital of the oil industry. As a child I played football outside in more than 50°C. Ahvaz was officially the hottest city on Earth. The city was just 80km away from the frontline of the Iran-Iraq war. According to independent reports, Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons 387 times in that region during eight years of war. The chemicals were made in the Soviet Union, East and West Germany. The mustard gas killed combatants and civilians alike and remained in the soil. After the war, and due to global warming, the city slowly became hotter and hotter. The chemically poisoned soil slowly dried out. The wind came and swept the dust up into the air. The fine dust pollution in Ahvaz is 52 times higher than the maximum tolerable limit for one’s health. Around 290 days a year there is a thick haze mixed with chemicals called ‘Sand Storms.’ Ahvaz then officially became the number one in yet another area: The most polluted city on earth. The moment the oil is depleted Ahvaz will become a ghost town. A big wave of climate migrants. A tsunami of cancer! For most people, an apocalyptic environmental catastrophe is still something that is coming in the future. For us, people from Ahvaz, it has already happened.

Sina Ataeian Dena is an Iranian-German filmmaker and artist. Sina lectures at the national university of film and television dffb, UdK University of arts Berlin, and Filmuniversität Potsdam. His video arts and photographs were exhibited at prestigious contemporary art museums such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Villa Merkel, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. In 2015, his debut feature film “Paradise” was nominated for Golden Leopard in the main competition of Locarno Film Festival, and won two awards, Ecumenical Church Award and Art Peace Award, among many other festival attendees and awards around the world. In 2016, he was awarded a scholarship from Goethe Institut Villa Tarabya Istanbul. In 2018 he exhibited his first video works in the modern and contemporary art museum Villa Merkel together with Francis Alys and !Mediengruppe Bitnik. Sina was Dramaturge and associate producer of the documentary “Seven winters in Tehran” Steffi Niederzoll which won Best film of Perspective section and the Heinrich Böll prize Berlinale 2023, F-ACT award at CPH:DOX Copenhagen among ongoing festival attendees and further awards.

Dans la tour de la ville de Malakoff "Et n’être que brume » met en place le cadre expérimental d’une improvisation.Plongés dans les brumes, les êtres se révèlent. L’écran de la fumée permet une libération des affects car au sein du brouillard se logent les souvenirs, les torpeurs et les désirs. Le film est en hommage à la Crimée annexée depuis 2014 par la Russie.

This is a metaphorical story about two young skaters who are trying to make sense of themselves in the world.

Inspired by Donna Haraway and John Berger’s contemporary theories on interspecies relations, Andro Eradze fills the frames of his works with plants and animals poised to exceed their boundaries. His camera follows scenes on the cusp of something undefined: a smouldering campfire, a stormy forest of wind-whipped trees, a flooding football pitch. Accompanied by haunting, transcendent soundtracks, his films feel like a compilation of the transitional moments of a feature film, leaving the viewer with a sense of expansive anticipation. Eradze’s new video installation for The Milk of Dreams, titled Raised in the dust (2022), stems from the conclusion of classical Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela’s The Snake Eater (1901). The poem’s protagonist has a supernatural talent for understanding the language of nature; he must decide between his connection to nature and his social responsibilities, ultimately bowing to the latter. Eradze’s film takes place in a forest. Taxidermized animals appear one by one, disturbed by an uproar of New Year’s Eve fireworks. Critical of the human carnival that is disruptive, toxic, and fatal for wildlife, Eradze’s film repositions fireworks as an entry point onto the dark and mythological side of the forest, a world of plants, animals, and phantoms.

Andro Eradze (b. 1993) lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi) MFA program. His works meditate on the qualitative nature of images, still as well as moving. Working primarily in Georgia, Eradze experiments with introducing narratives to the outskirts of human habitation, in the literal and figurative sense. The feeling of an uncanny, non-anthropocentric presence in his works invites the viewer to the liminal space between the subjective and the visceral, between cognition, perception and the alien otherness of non-human experience. Animals, objects, plants, and digital artifacts permeate a sense of presence in a landscape that exists simultaneously parallel and entangled human experience. Eradze’s practice investigates the potentiality of animism as method. Photography, installations, experimental cinema practices and video blend into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene is faltering, and everything operates independently of it. Building upon the legacy of alternative approaches to reality—surrealism and magical realism—his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

What is our relationship to our tech devices? How do smart devices exist in the world? What do we want from them? What do they want from us? "Our Non-Understanding of Everything" is a daily practice, where we observe and speculate of how our personal tech devices and their building parts exist in a possible future, shared between the architecture of circuitry, political thought and the wild and programmed parts of our natural environments. “Our Non-Understanding of Everything” signals a complete openness to learn, shift viewpoints, upturn embedded prejudices, discover, surprise and draw connections between phenomena and things that reside and operate in wildly diverse realms. The project aligns with non-representational ideas, in which events and encounters in the world are constituted through emergent, relational, and intangible complexities that cannot necessarily be articulated or contained within the particular ways we attempt to represent them.

eteam is a two people collaboration who uses video, performance, installation and writing to instigate and articulate encounters at the edges of diverging cultural, technical and aesthetical universes. Traversing over earthly planes they trigger communication, collaborations and transformations between humans, nature, and technologies. Through their artistic practice eteam finds ways to collaborate with people who operate on the edges of mainstream culture and the marketplace. They are drawn to those willing to experiment, cross genres and cultural boundaries, they forge proximity and make visible the interconnections we humans share with land, animals, plants, ghosts, deities and objects. Eteam’s work is land- and process-based, often long term, situational and happens in places they don’t inhabit permanently. Practicing art is their way to enter the “outside,” pay close attention to the details, while trying to understand the whole. Eteam’s narratives have screened internationally in video- and film festivals, they lectured in universities, presented in art galleries and museums and performed in the desert, on fields, in caves and on mountaintops, in ships, black box theaters and horse-drawn wagons. They could not have done this without the generous support of Creative Capital and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Art in General, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and MacDowell, the City College of New York, the Academy of Visual Art HKBU and the Fulbright Scholar Program, among many others. Their novel “Grabeland” was published by Nightboat Books in February 2020. They are represented by Gallery M29, Cologne Germany and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

Time and again, the feature film places animal actors at the side of its human protagonists – sometimes as loyal companions, sometimes as fierce opponents. However, its stagings do not only instrumentalise animals to release emotions, but also raise a fundamental question of our anthropocentric self-image: how to deal with the experience of the otherness of the animal?

Christoph Girardet, born in 1966, and Matthias Mu?ller, born in 1961, have been collaborating in film, video, photography, and installation since 1999. They had solo exhibitions at institutions such as FACT, Liverpool, Kunstverein Hannover and West, The Hague. They have participated in group shows at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, and Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, among others. Both have taken part in major film festivals worldwide, including the festivals at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto, Locarno, Oberhausen and Rotterdam. Their work is included in several public and private collections.

“The Peaceable Kingdom” is a deep fake ontology. It is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces metaphorically and physically as both totems and discrete intelligent beings. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks.

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modeling, video editing, and image editing programs. Bunkley, an NZ/USA citizen, has also been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA. International screenings include the White Box gallery in NYC and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. In 2012 Bunkley was an award winner at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the «Now&After» Festival. He took part in the Athens Digital Arts Festival and File Sao Paolo 2017, 2018, and 2019. Bunkley screened his video, Ghost Shelter/6 at The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany in 2018, Docfest Kassel 2019 and Jihlava IDFF 2021 and 2022, Czech Republic. And Video Art Miden and Video Art Projects, Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, FILE SP 2023 exhibition and Hochkantfilmfest, Portrait -video on advertising billboards, Bremen, Germany in 2023 Recent group exhibitions include the “Stories of Rust”, Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga, NZ, and “Green Around'' in Taipei, Taiwan in 2019, the Auckland Botanic Gardens 2022 and “Sculpture on the Gulf” 2022, Auckland, NZ, the “2021 National Contemporary Art Award”, Waikato Museum, Waikato, NZ and “Visions in the Nunnery”, Bows Art/Nunnery Gallery, London in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Solo exhibitions include the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand in 2018, the Institut für Alles Mögliche/Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Berlin 2019, The Rabbit Room, Napier, NZ 2022, at Scott Lawrie Gallery, Auckland New Zealand 2022, and aGallery, Whanganui, NZ.

A quadruplet raised on a collie farm explores human-dog behaviors through queer “puppy play,” leading to nuanced discoveries of how people treat people “like animals.”

Lax’s films and video installations have screened and been exhibited at venues including Viennale (Austria), IHME Contemporary (Helsinki), MIX New York and MIX Brasil (São Paulo), table (Chicago), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), REDCAT, Film Forum, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, The Drawing Center (New York), and CROSSROADS (San Francisco), among others. Lax’s organizational projects include those held at Anthology Film Archives (NY), Fellows of Contemporary Art (LA), and Human Resources LA. Lax’s writing has appeared in print and online publications including MARCH Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), ArtPractical, and Texte Zur Kunst), as well a catalogue contribution with the Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX) and a limited edition zine with Inga Books (Chicago).

A bird carries us swiftly through empty lobbies and offices of a bank in Frankfurt, until it collides with a glass façade and falls to the floor. In this way, ‘Killing Kidding Colliding’ shows glass as both a material and an ideological symbol, moving between transparency and reflection, making things visible but impossible to touch. Moving mechanically between the different spaces of the bank, it draws attention to its own technique, while looking at the power and ideology of modern architecture, and how its immediate openness, transparency and smoothness also contain an underlying and invisible volatility.

Freja Sofie Kirk is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Working across video, photography and installation, and often in connection with each other, she looks at the inner mechanisms and contradictions of images. Her work takes the form of a continuous study of spatial and medial constructions, the violence they perform and the architecture they manifest. By utilizing the camera, Freja Sofie Kirk attempts to renegotiate the power relations inherent in both archi- tecture and image production.

The film Thirst is a post-human choreography of machines and displaced plants. Millions of tons of Estonian peat end up in greenhouses in the Netherlands, where it is used as a soil substrate for tropical Phalaenopsis orchids. Meanwhile, local communities in Estonia are left with dry wells and a lack of drinking water as their fragile wetlands are drained for peat extraction. The orchids from the Netherlands then find their way back to supermarkets and homes in Estonia. It is a thirst for luxury and abundance that keeps the capitalist machinery running. Thirst is one episode from Kristina Norman’s Orchidelirium film trilogy. Commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Author and director: Kristina Norman Cinematographer: Erik Norkroos Composer: Märt-Matis Lill Choreographer and cast: Mari Mägi Produced by Rühm Pluss Null in collaboration with CCA Estonia

Kristina Norman (b.1979, lives and works in Tallinn) is an artist whose interdisciplinary work includes video installations, sculpture, and projects in the city space, as well as documentaries and performance. She is interested in the issues of collective memory, the memorial uses of the public space, but also the subtle sphere of the body politic that transgresses the boundaries between the public and the private. In 2009 she represented Estonia at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, with a solo project; a multilayered mixed media installation entitled After-War. The project was a study of a conflict around the relocation of a Soviet monument in Tallinn. In 2022 at the 59th edition, the artist again represented Estonia with an ecocritical exhibition “Orchidelirium. An Appetite For Abundance”, a duo show with Bita Razavi, curated by Corina Apostol. Norman’s experimental film trilogy commissioned for the Estonian Pavilion, offers multiple ways to reflect on the legacies of colonialism from a specifically Eastern European perspective.

For some years Wood Wide Web is the magic phrase to describe the web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another. In ‘What Wide Web?’ Van Bakel depicts the surreal wasteland of Rotterdam Maasvlakte and its forest of pylons. After a bumpy ride we zoom in on the improbable beauty germinating underneath high voltage lines, a living part of our world hardly ever noticed. The plants that grow below the energy-web are shown as in a digital herbarium. We can ask ourselves: are industry and nature evolving more into co-existence? Background info: Location: Rotterdam harbour, Beerweg Maasvlakte, a place that used to be a nature reserve called ‘de Beer’. Sound: Contact mics on humming power-pylons. Geophones in the earth on the spot that record the sound of falling raindrops. Camera: Animation of still photographs made with home-built scannercamera. Instead of bringing plants to a picture-scanner in his studio, the artist dragged the scanner on site over soil and green. “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Atshean word for world is also the word for forest.” Ursula K. Le Guin from The Word for World is Forest.

Michiel van Bakel studied astronomy, film/photography (Psychopolis; Frans Zwartjes) and psychology for several years before he chose for fine art, at art school. Van Bakel expresses himself artistically in film and videos, sculpture and installations. His work focuses on people and their surroundings, often resulting in a poetic reality. It conveys a fascination for the tension between humans and technology, and the perception of time in our disrupted ecosystems. Van Bakel lives and works in Rotterdam.

New Centuries Are Rare is a short film by the artist collective coyote (SWE/DK). The film explores the interlaced history of the former mining village Norberg in Sweden and the emblematic story of the electronic music scene at the turn of the last century. Sampling these intersections in time, New Centuries are Rare unfolds a journey through psychological, chemical and technological rhythms placed in close proximity to the grinding resistance present in the region’s past.

coyote is a multidisciplinary artist collective founded in 2017. Their collective practice is constantly in flux and moves between artistic and curatorial work. In addition to several self-produced exhibitions and projects, coyote have exhibited at Bizarro (DK), KØS - Museum of Art in Public Spaces (DK), Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (SE), NSFW/SVILOVA (SE) and curated events at Filmform (SE), Moderna Museét (SE) and Bonamatic (DK) among others.

Creatures of the Lines is an artist film and collaboration with anthropologist Heather Anne Swanson. It explores how desires for economic growth and linear progress have produced straightened forms in England’s watery terrains and asks what risks are associated with the conversion of once-curvy and braided worlds into a linearised landscape. Drawing on their longstanding research interests and conversations exploring the risks to and in aquatic ecologies with freshwater scientists, the film explores how English waterscapes have been transformed via the construction of canals. As arteries of British Empire, canals linked Indian cotton fields to domestic textile mills, facilitating vast ecological transformations from monoculture agriculture in the colonies to industrial discharges in England’s waters, soils, and air– and thus serve as a key site for exploring often-overlooked histories of colonial capitalism and their material presences in contemporary worlds. Attempting to work from within muddy, submerged sites, rather than from grand narratives or “god’s-eye” viewpoints, the work begins inside canals, telling stories from within the lines. Making use of the open-ended sensibilities of ethnography and natural history, it raises questions about ecological transformations and their ties to infra/structures of global political economy.

Sonia Levy's inquiry-led practice considers shifting modes of engagement with more-than-human worlds in light of prevailing Earthly precarity. Her work operates at the confluence of knowledge practices to interrogate Western expansionist and extractivist logics. She is the 2023-2024 recipient of the European Marine Board artist-in-residence programme. She was the 2022 selected artist of the S+T+ARTS4Water residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice and the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's "Ecological Globalization Research Group". She has presented her work internationally, including shows and screenings at Ocean Space, Venice; Museo Thyssen, Madrid; Museo CA2M, Madrid; Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; ICA, London; The Showroom, London; Goldsmiths College, London; BALTIC, Gateshead; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Art Laboratory Berlin; HDKV, Heidelberg; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris; Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, Iceland Whale Museum, Iceland; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge USA; NYU Gallatin, New-York, Paris. Her work has been published by MIT Press and Thames & Hudson.

While observing an isolated event of an artificial, industry-facilitated disaster, Normalisation of A Disaster makes a reflective commentary on the psyche of people in the vicinity of the site of disaster, albeit not immediately affected by it. Exploring the ideas of nonchalance, sensitization and casual tourism towards sites of disaster in a region plagued by disasters, this reflection includes the self of the artist, and his family, and hordes of ‘tourists’ attracted towards the light of the morbid spectacle. The Baghjan Oil Blowout happened on 27th of May 2020, which caught fire through a massive explosion on 9th of June 2020 after leaking gas in the atmosphere for two weeks, continued to burn for 6 months, before being finally doused on 15th of November, 2020. This artificial disaster in an Oil-India Limited owned site has caused the displacement of more than 1600 families who were in the vicinity of the site of gas blowout, and were being sheltered in makeshift relief camps in nearby areas.

Devadeep Gupta B. 1989 Guwahati, Assam, India I frame my artistic process as an exploration of regional ecological uncertainties through a critical examination of associated mainstream perspectives. Inspired by site-specific and vernacular occurrences, I delve into the intricate relationship between people and their land. My artistic practice encompasses the realms of film and sculpture, bridging the gap between conceptual and documentary approaches. Within this intersection, I am particularly interested in narratives that emerge from the convergence of mythology and contemporary experiences. Grounded in the rich cultural landscape of Assam, I draw inspiration from pragmatic practices, oral traditions, and folklore. Central to my artistic endeavors are performative processes that pay homage to meta-cultural practices. Through visual and conceptual stimuli, I incorporate elements of local community-led actions to portray the environmental changes specific to each site. Everyday rituals that have organically evolved as meta-cultural actions inspire the forms and expressions within my artistic practice. The outtakes of my process, realized as rhythmic sculptural forms are expressed through mediums of film, image and sculpture to illustrate these outcomes. ?

In the dead of winter, the gas flares and spectral sounds of an oil boom awaken the long-abandoned prairies and ghost towns of North Dakota.

Adam James Smith is a British filmmaker based in New York. His filmmaking practice spans rural and urban environments across China, Japan, and the United States. His first feature film, The Land of Many Palaces, on the Chinese "ghost city" of Ordos, participated in the Sundance Institute workshop and premiered at the 2015 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. The film then went on to screen at festivals and on television around the world, picking up awards in Moscow, Rome, and Kyoto. His follow-up film, Americaville, on the Chinese replica of Jackson Hole, Wyoming was sponsored by the Whicker's Foundation and the Asian Cinema Fund. The film was released in 2020 and has since been screened around the world at festivals and universities. Adam is currently completing a series of films documenting the diversity of the rural experience throughout the American heartland, including the country’s oldest Black rodeo in Okmulgee Invitational, the oil boom awakening the abandoned homesteads of North Dakota in Frontier Phantom, and Native American cowboys in Arapaho Pasture. Adam was educated in film at Stanford and anthropology at Cambridge, the latter of which he is currently an Affiliated Filmmaker at the university’s Visual Anthropology Lab.

Grâce à un rituel de réveil, Nyabhingi la déesse de l’abondance s’élève du Liangombe souffle Mazuku. Elle doit guérir Goma(Rd Congo) de la destruction et rétablir l’écologie balance. Avec ses guerriers, Ils sont témoins de la désolation causée par l’arrogance industrielle qui a profané la terre, invoquant la fureur de Lingombe, l’esprit de discipline qui corrige tous les torts. Lingombe crache du feu et Mahindule (lave) pour avertir le peuple de ses transgressions.

Mauridi Primo est un photographe et cinéaste originaire de Goma (RDC Congo). Comme un jeune artiste qu’il a fait son apprentissage pendant plusieurs années au centre culturel Yole Africa!, sous la supervision pédagogique et artistique de la cinéaste et activiste Petna Ndaliko Katondolo. il a participé IXes Jeux de la francophonie avec sa réalisation nommer (Mobembo). il a été avec son film Bila Mask au Festival film Congo in Harlem, et cette même année, il a remporté l’Académie Canon VII bourse. En avril 2022, il participe à la rencontre numérique internationale La Rencontre Internationale des Arts Numériques et Visuels à Abidjan.

"De Anima" spans documentary and animation and features a dreamlike narrative examining how various gendered, racialized, economic, and metabolic systems embedded within the global health system—which have become especially apparent during the COVID-19 crisis—drive fear of contamination from the nonhuman world. The work’s departure point is Jo’s 2018 field research in Myanmar with Smithsonian wildlife veterinarians who were hunting for new strains of coronavirus to predict their pandemic potential. The sacred caves depicted in "De Anima" are both high-risk interfaces as well as sites of spiritual encounter between humans and animals, science and religion, nature and politics—interfaces where ecosystems cross and feed into global conflict. This behind-the-scenes work had been underway for years, and sheds light on the inevitable: not of a why but an unknown when—offering an ominous prelude to the current global health crisis. Recorded in Myanmar, Kenya, and France, the images and sounds featured in "De Anima" that once felt so ‘far away’ now deeply resonate in the everyday. The work exposes subtexts that reveal deeper issues embedded within society at large, namely the neglect and treatment of health beyond the human in an era of accelerated globalization.

Clara Jo's work has been exhibited and screened her work at Gropius Bau (Berlin), Centre Pompidou (Paris), ARKO Art Center (Seoul), Royal Academy of Arts (London), Spike Island (Bristol), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (Oldenburg). She has previously held fellowships and residencies at Art Explora (Paris), Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (USA). She has presented her work for talks at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), and King’s College (London).

In the three channel video installation 'I’ve Always Demanded More From The Sunset' a mysterious female artificial intelligence warns us about humans being naturally drawn to killing. While navigating different sequences of breathing exercises to overcome fear and what seems to be an array of non human entities in a state of uncanniness and disbelief, different associations and questions beginn to appear: What stories lie in the forest? What arises in the ruins of man made devastation? An orchestrated symphony of mushrooms emerges from the ground like a poetic anticipation of post-human life.

Eli Cortiñas is a video artist of Cuban descent, born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She was a guest professor at the Art Academy Kassel and the Art Academy Mainz and shared a professorship for Spatial Concepts with Candice Breitz at the University of Art Braunschweig from 2019 till 2022 Cortiñas has recently been appointed professor for Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She has received numerous grants and residencies, including Fundación Botín, Kunstfonds, Villa Massimo, Berlin Senate, Villa Sträuli, Goethe Institute, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Rupert and Karl Schmidt Rottluff among others. Cortiñas’ work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Museum Ludwig, Kunsthalle Budapest, CAC Vilnius, SCHIRN Kunsthalle, SAVVY Contemporary, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Museum Marta Herford, Kunstraum Innsbruck, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art Moscow, Kunstmuseum Bonn and MUSAC et al., as well as in international Biennials and festivals such as Ural Industrial Biennial, Riga Biennale, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Mardin Biennale, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Curtas Vila Do Conde and Nashville Film Festival et al. She lives and works in Berlin.

'Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars', shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, is a hypnotic exploration of nonhuman forms of consciousness and different dimensions of symbiotic life: interdependence, surrender, death, and decay. The images gradually layer, alongside intimate lyrics of a song that channels the desires of an entity shapeshifting across different genders, voices, and beyond-human embodiments. Featuring a cast comprised of local youth, alongside performer and choreographer Mami Kang, the film unfolds through a specially conceived song, choreography and costumes. Horizontality in the choreography undoes the usual verticality of the human figure, unfurling her into the landscape.The performers’ bodies are sites of activity, though they’re often horizontal, pulled toward the earth and one another, moving through the forest, along the sand dunes and water. The song lyrics draw on the work and words of biologist Lynn Margulis, celebrating the role of bacteria in making life and the collaboration between the single-cell organisms possible, as well as concepts by the science-fiction author Octavia Butler, who employed tropes of symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorisation.

Egl? Budvytyt? (b. 1981, Lithuania) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Vilnius working at the intersection between visual and performing arts. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles and for dominant narratives governing public spaces. Her practice, spanning across songs, poetry, videos and performances, explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and permeable relationships between bodies, audiences and the environment. Her work was shown amongst others at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Vleeshal, Middelburg, NL, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary art (RIBOCA); Renaissance Society, Chicago, Lofoten International Art festival; Block Universe festival, London; Art Dubai commissions; Liste, Art Basel; 19th Biennale of Sydney; De Appel Arts Centre; CAC in Vilnius, and Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam. Egle was resident at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR, 2012) and at Wiels, Contemporary art centre, (Brussels, BE, 2013).

A seemingly disembodied voice reflects on what it takes to survive, in a world modeled after a perception of reality far from what the one it experiences on a daily basis.

Nelson Bourrec Carter is a French-American filmmaker and visual artist. His practice combines photography, film, installation and performance while his research revolve around the links woven between real territories and fantasized landscapes, whether they be urban, peri-urban, or rural, influenced by the weight of popular imagery. His work focuses mainly on the influence of American iconography on identity construction and racial awareness, and operates from places whose hybridity, history or architecture lend themselves to a new interpretation. He demonstrates that these visual tropes are more interconnected than they appear and that they articulate questions of gender, race, and class, while raising the issue of which bodies - whether they are embodied or inscribed in a ghostlike manner within the architecture - occupy the spaces of representation in the American cultural economy. Nelson’s films have been shown in festivals such as New Directors/New Films, Entrevues Belfort, Vila do Conde or within institutions like the Cinémathèque Française or the Jeu de Paume.