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Two Stones explores the trajectories and ideals of the Bauhaus-trained, German architect Lotte Stam-Beese and the Caribbean activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud through dialogues and appearances by contemporary protagonists. Both Stam-Beese and Huiswoud spent time working in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and both ended up being active in the Netherlands after WWII. Two Stones was filmed in the 1930s constructivist district of KhTZ in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the first large housing project on which Lotte Stam-Beese worked, and in Stam-Beese’s celebrated 1950s Pendrecht, designed during her period as Rotterdam’s main architect/urban planner. In the 1970s, Hermina Huiswoud was agitating against the Rotterdam housing rule, which limited Caribbean Dutch inhabitants to settle in any of the city’s districts if their presence would exceed 5% of the population. Resonances as well as dissonances between the distinct trajectories of the two women and their expectation from communist ideology, are sensed through thoughts and experiences of the protagonists, who all have a personal or professional relation to the issues at hand. Two Stones (2020), is a single image edit with two soundtracks played sequentially.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation, collaborating with participants in different scenarios, to co-produce the script. With these works, which look at the structures that form and hinder us, she participated in various large biennials, and in smaller dedicated shows. Recent solo presentations include: tono lengua boca at CA2M Madrid 2019-20 and Fabra i Coats Barcelona 2020; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including at Kunsthall Wien 2020, Stedelijk Museum amsterdam 2020, the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin, Zentrum Paul Klee Bern 2019 and SALT Istanbul 2020. Van Oldenborgh is a member of the (Dutch) Society for Arts and a recipient of the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Art (2014). A monographic publication, Amateur, was published by Sternberg Press, Berlin; If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam and The Showroom, London in 2016.

"ZaraZ" is a sci-fi video essay within the framework of experimental cinema, chronopolitics, and philosophy. In the post-communist era, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, discourses of the end of history emerged. Instead of past-present-future structure, we are witnessing a temporal shift into the Now, which is continuously melting into the future present. “ZaraZ” reflects on the consequences of acceleration and alienation in modern societies. It portrays brutalist architecture sites, built to implement a “promise” for a brighter future into public spaces; and urban landscapes damaged by industrialisation and economic growth. Nostalgia for the future is expressed in disintegrating architectural forms of public and private spaces, and the possibility of multiple presents emerging out of multiple pasts. "ZaraZ" investigates speculative temporalities of the city and explore relations between time and architecture; virtual, real, and actual; current modes of how we instrumentalize history and memory. In a world of a single urban temporal synchronicity, the question remains: What Times are responsible for the production of imagined futures?

Lesia Vasylchenko is a Kyiv-born artist based in Oslo. Her practice spans between installation, moving image and photography. Vasylchenko is a co-curator of the artist-run gallery space Podium and a founder of STRUKTURA. Time, a cross-disciplinary initiative for research and practice within the framework of visual arts, media archaeology, literature, and philosophy. She holds a degree in Journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and Fine Arts from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her works have been shown among others at Haugar Art Museum; Tenthaus Oslo; Berlin Transnational Queer Underground; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale; Korea Queer Film Festival.

The film investigates, analyses the theme of efficient modernity whose last consequence will be extinction, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu's speech having as background, motive, the post-apocalyptic present of the Omnia Hall, which thus acquires the meaning of a warning: we are again at the end of a road, that of the cult of production.

Mona Vatamanu (b. 1968) and Florin Tudor (b. 1974) work and live in Bucharest. Their practice consists of attentive observation and taking notice of material elements of reality. They often choose from it that which is ephemereal, small, marginal as dust, rust, fire, fluff from the tree’s seeds, soil. The work of the artists with such material can be a starting point for questioning social relations, technological and economic changes, political conflicts.

An essay film told through the body, 'Coal Mine in the Canary' explores the work of John Scott Haldane, the late 19th century physiologist whose experiments with respiration in atmospheric extremes led him to put canaries in coal mines as early indicators of air toxicity. The film explores this historical technique as a form of environmental control, one that would ultimately shape the possibilities of exchange between organisms and their surroundings, determined as a series of regulated variables. In the canary, Haldane developed a new paradigm: to modify an organism is a form of environmental control because there is no border at which the organism begins and the environment ends.

Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and writer. Working in moving image, text, installation and lectures, he constructs non-linear narratives situated within the ever shifting threshold of the human body. ? He has presented his work in festivals, exhibitions and conferences internationally including: Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Eye Film Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Media Art Biennale WRO, 5th and 6th Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, Plato Ostrava, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Kunsthalle Amsterdam, Sonic Acts, Impakt Festival, Berlin Atonal, Venice Biennale, White Columns among many others. His work has been featured in Artforum, Spike Magazine Quarterly, Frieze Magazine, Kaleidoscope Press, Flash Art and Die Zeit. His writing has been published in Valiz and Sonic Acts Press among others.

On a street corner in Queens, New York, an elderly, white-haired woman hovers, apparently waiting or looking for something – then starts approaching passersby. Miked up close, but viewed – surveillance-style – from distant rooftops, she asks them philosophical questions about turning points in their lives, sometimes eliciting candidly revealing answers from people who seemingly need to talk. She’s also seen up close at street level, viewed by a shaky nearby camera. And intermittently we hear the affectless voiceover of an English male reading an account of a prison spell. What exactly are we seeing? A documentary of sorts? A fiction stripped of its expected signposts? The woman is real-life casting director Martha Wollner, but the film never makes it clear what her mission is, what she hopes to learn, and what her relation is to the distant speaker (who may also be the distant observer). Echoing Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, as well as works by Phillip Warnell’s fellow British experimental directors John Smith and Chris Petit, this is an enigmatic, elusive piece. Yet, as the title suggests, those moments when Wollner connects with the interiority of perfect strangers makes this an alluringly, unexpectedly compassionate guerrilla foray into urban experience. (Jonathan Romney)

Phillip Warnell is an artist-filmmaker, a writer, and the director of the Visible Institute, for research in film and photography, at Kingston University, London. He produces film works and texts exploring a range of philosophical and poetic thematics, also exploring ideas on human-animal relations. His most recent film, The Flying Proletarian (2017), premiered at CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, in March 2017. During his fellowship, Warnell is addressing a series of interconnected questions on “animality-cinemality-criminality,” involving engagement with film professionals and researchers relative to screen-based roles and exploring the relationship among appearance, measurement, and typecasting. He is also developing script-based ideas for a planned feature-length film, currently in development, that investigates ideas on misobservation and apparitions of other life-worlds, accessing archival material to inform and incorporate into the project. Warnell’s film work has been exhibited extensively, including recent screenings at the ICA in London, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, in Berlin, and Tate Modern, in London, as well as in such prestigious film festivals as the Locarno Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Viennale. Previous exhibitions have included at the Moderna galerija, in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Sharjah Biennial, in United Arab Emirates; and Wellcome Collection, in London. His film Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air (2014) won the 2014 Georges de Beauregard International Prize at FID International Film Festival Marseille and the 2015 Universities SIC Award at IndieLisboa.

Tropic Telecom reflects contemporary Paris in its hybrid post-colonial reality. The film develops from the Palais de la Porte Dorée, which opened in 1931 on the occasion of the Paris Colonial Exhibition. It is the only building of the exhibition that was preserved after the end of the event, located in the southeast of the city bordering on the Périphérique. Its architectural style presents itself as a synthesis of the formerly modern Art Déco, as well as freely interpreted elements of native art and architectural styles. A crocodile basin is to be found in the still accessible aquarium of the palace that was used to showcase fish from the tropical colonies. As the film proceeds, an albino alligator that the basin houses today, embarks on a surreal journey. It leads the viewer through places of French colonial and migration history, as well as large brutalist and post-modern housing estates on the outskirts of Paris that were built from 1970 onwards and which stand for the residential utopia of a postcolonial Paris. A structure of images emerges that situates the ongoing aesthetic, political and social negotiation processes in a polyphonic communicative field.

Nico Joana Weber (*1983 in Bonn) lives and works in Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany. She studied Fine Art and Art History at Goldsmiths College London and completed her postgraduate studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne in 2013. By means of different artistic media such as video, installation, photography and drawing, she explores the aesthetic and political characteristics of architecture and landscape in transcultural contexts. Weber's work is fuelled by an unsteady search for historical traces and cultural processes of transformation and appropriation that doesn't arrive at simplistic solutions but rather focuses on zones of ambivalence. Nico Joana Weber has received numerous grants and awards, most notably the Villa Romana Prize (2016) and the Bonn Art Award (2019). Selected exhibitions and festivals include: Kunstmuseum, Bonn (2020), Kunstverein Kärnten, Klagenfurt (2019), Goethe Institute Bulgaria, Sofia (2019), Artothek, Cologne (2018), Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2017), Museum unter Tage, Bochum (2017), Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl (2017), Villa Romana, Florence (2016), Goethe Institute, Paris (2016), Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York (2015), International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2015).

The work is a paper made video composed of digital image and physical material that delves into the essence of moving image. I divided the digital video into the film ratio of 24-frame-per-second. Through the process of digital transforming in printing and scanning, the re-composed video is in between movement and stillness, virtual and concrete, digital and material. The contrasts have thus been thus related to the Oriental philosophy of Taoism, "one body with two sides". With the video, I was trying to visualize the abstract natural law which denies description. Tao is empty yet inexhaustible, hidden but always present, a way of life yet not a locatable truth. darkness within darkness seeks, in the same way, to be comprises of the very contrast between the established (material) and the abstract (digital) through revealing the invisible time in image.

Wu Chia-Yun (b.1988, Taiwan) received an MA degree in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art (London) and an MFA degree in Motion Picture from the National Taiwan University of Arts (Taipei). She is an artist and filmmaker based in Taipei, her work is a mixture of image, video, mixed media and installation, focusing on the topics of “human condition” and “the time of image”. Wu has been awarded as Emerging Artist Made in Taiwan by the Ministry of Culture (2017), First Prize of Kaohsiung Awards by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (2019), and has had a solo exhibition at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2019). Her works have also been internationally selected to the European Media Art Festival (2020), The European Independent Film Channel (2015), Shanghai international Film Festival (2014).

"Filmer à Dakar, présences singulières entre le sable, la ville et le delta" est un diptyque vidéo mettant en relation des espaces naturels, des espaces construits et leurs occupants. Les séquences formées par le diptyque tissent une trame dont l’agencement se renouvelle au gré des projections en boucle. D’une part un défilement de lieux tels que la ville en construction de Diamniadio ou des espaces en transition comme les espaces en démontage de la Biennale de Dakar dans l’ancien palais de justice. D’autre part, l’activité dense au cœur de la Corniche en bord de mer, où la caméra avance dans le mouvement fluide des séances d’entraînements. Un jeune garçon à l’écart tente un "selfie". Circulant d’une projection à l’autre on se rend compte de la complémentarité de celles-ci: l’énergie déployée sur la Corniche magnétise les espaces vides, en transition, présentés dans l’autre écran. Ces deux projections dans lesquelles se déploient espaces intérieurs et extérieurs, et leurs occupants, interpellent l’écologie du vivre ensemble, dont les paramètres sont en perpétuelle mouvance.

Les œuvres de Myriam Yates se déploient sous forme de grandes projections vidéographiques ou de séries photographiques. Elle privilégie une approche hybride de l’image entre une certaine forme de document et l’essai vidéo. Elle s’intéresse à la construction de l’espace public, aux jonctions entre l’aménagement et la nature ainsi qu’à la notion de territoire. Ses œuvres ont été présentées lors d’événements tels que le Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel (Allemagne); le Images Festival, Toronto (Canada), les Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (France/Allemagne), le Mois de la Photo à Montréal (Canada) et Nuit Blanche, Toronto (Canada). Elles ont fait l’objet d’expositions individuelles et collectives, notamment à la Galerie d’art Foreman de l’Université Bishop’s, Sherbrooke (Canada), au Hessel Museum of Art — CCS Bard, New York (USA), au Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada), au centre d’art contemporain OPTICA, Montréal (Canada), à Dazibao, Montréal (Canada). Un essai dans la revue Prefix Photo sur les architectures improbables a été consacré à ses œuvres vidéographiques accompagnant une exposition au Prefix ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto (Canada). Elle remporte en 2015 le Prix Victor-Martyn-Lynch-Staunton (arts médiatiques) du Conseil des arts du Canada. Originaire de Montréal, elle vit présentement à Sherbrooke. Ses projets sont régulièrement financés par les Conseils des arts et des lettres du Québec et du Canada.