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Industries of Freedom portrays a group of dancers who work at the biggest EDM night club in the world - Privilege. The dancers are being lifted up in cranes, carried over a beach in the mouth of an inflatable shark, or are hovering under the ceiling in the club. We experience how their bodies transform into scenographic objects, that merge with the rest of the stage construction. In Industries of Freedom, the night club is presented both as a workplace with strictly defined roles and as a space wherein one can live out notions of freedom and ecstasy, which is nonetheless strictly choreographed by the commercial logics of the entertainment industry.

Esben Weile Kjær and Freja Sofie Kirk both work in visual arts with various medias including film, photography, sculpture and performance. For the past five years, they have collaborated on several film projects, exploring identity, pop culture and image production. Their work have been represented in The National Gallery of Denmark, ARoS Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthal Aarhus, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, The Factory for Art and Design and featured on platforms such as i-D, Tissue Magazine, Indechs and Out Magazine. Freja Sofie Kirk (born 1990) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Working with video, photography and sculpture, and often in combination with each other, her work explores narratives, popular culture and how images generate meaning in contemporary society. Freja Sofie Kirk has a background in film and photography and through the work with two-dimensional representations of the world, she has attained a sincere interest in the meaning of images and also an urge to dissolve or transform them into material qualities. Her works contain a constant interplay, between materiality and the mechanic, the sensuous and its absence, reality and the unreal. They are simultaneously both visually seductive and disturbing, but none the less, are they an image of the symptoms that our present reality leaves us with. Esben Weile Kjær (born 1992) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Spanning sculpture, video and performance, his work draws on the history of pop culture and pop music to investigate themes of nostalgia, authenticity, and generational anxiety. In an attentive though reckless visual language, he investigates today’s event economy, often focusing on marketing tactics and the aesthetics of the entertainment industry. Mainly to consider art’s relationship to its surrounding culture industries. As such, his work attempts to not only mimic other cultural modes of performance (such as those found in raves, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercial space, using props such as podiums, confetti canons, fences, and party lasers.

"What happens when someone dies is that we, the living, contain their memory within us ... They will live on in us, and we will celebrate them. And dance like there is no tomorrow". Diane Torr A dance dedicated to artist, drag king and gender activist Diane Torr who passed away in May 2017. A year to the day, I dance in a black room : a single shot fusing male and female as ode to life and death. Traditional urban zeybekiko dance of Rebetiko, exclusively danced by men -in the past- is danced by my hybrid manifestation - blended aspects of my identity. In silence, I hear Diane's words: "Take space with all your being. Own the space". I lift my arms and dance like there is no tomorrow as the camera follows. No edits or retakes : the aim is not to please or excite but to offer myself as site for collective unburdening.

Fenia Kotsopoulou is a Greek cross-disciplinary, award-winning artist (performance (art), dance, video, photography), based in Lincoln (UK), holding a MFA in Choreographing Live Art from the University of Lincoln (UK), a BA Honours in Dance from the National Dance Academy of Rome (Italy), and a BA in Italian Language and Literature from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Over the course of the last 10 years, video making and photography became a dominant and persistent component of her artistic practice. Pivotal topics of recent projects include the body as gathering place of emotions and site of transformation, personal and collective memory, fragmentation, (de)construction of female identity, unbecoming, shame, hairiness and other issues. In the past few years, as (dance) performer, producer and visual practitioner, her works and the work of close-collaborator digital artist, Daz Disley, have been shown at a wide array of festivals and art platforms, encompassing the fields of dance, experimental performance, live-art and video-art, and receiving several prizes/awards. Alongside her practice, she is lecturer at the Master of Performance Practices at the university of ArtEZ (Netherlands) and, since 2016, she is artist-in-residence at x-church in Gainsborough (UK).

In a village in Chechnya a mother and a daughter speak about the return of an acquaintance.

Zaur Kourazov (1994) graduated from KASK in 2019 magna cum laude with his work, TIME IS (2020). His work dwells on themes such as memory, (cultural) identity and friendships which stem from intercultural aspects. Feeling connected to his ethnic culture and the assimilated culture, his work resides in a unique position by exploring 'in betweenness,' a very intriguing space of understanding both worlds yet not fitting in either of them.

In the video work "What is a Man Without a Shadow", a digital morphogenesis via AI is being used, as a method, taking its inspiration from biology, and it is used to describe the process of the evolutionary development of organisms and polymorphic systems. In digital morphogenesis, new forms replace the former ones, through the logic of optimization, via an open system of states of constant interaction. These organized structures are turning radically into disorganized ones, creating general disorder. Images get gradually degraded, revealing entities that change the consistency of space and time, with an average entropy value, enabling new realities to be tested in a virtual space. Consecutively, that allows the evolution of beings who strive to mark their existence in sequences that interact, passing from one situation to another, generating the genetic material of the project.

Makis Kyriakopoulos was born in Patra, Greece in 1975. He completed an MFA with distinction at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2004 and completed the postgraduate course of (ASFA), in Digital Arts. He works predominantly in Digital Arts and specifically focuses on the nature of movement, materiality and immateriality challenging the relationship between human and space. He has participated in numerous international festivals globally, public lectures, group and solo art exhibitions.

The Inmost Cell is a new video work by Eva L’Hoest which takes its narrative from the traditional tales of the Daugava river and the ruins of its underwater islands, flooded on the creation of the Riga dam. Through the combination of various digital processes, L'Hoest turns her photographic reportage of the outskirts of Riga into three-dimensional fluid architectures. These lost elements of Latvian culture mark a site of synthesis between humans, nature and man-made ruins. In a fusion of the rural and the maritime landscape referencing the calenture, a maritime mirage where the sea becomes an inviting grassy field, the artist imbues the images with a shifting, hallucinatory quality. Across slow, contemplative tracking movements, its different realities merge as forms fall one after the other, and passageways are created between places and memory.

Eva L’Hoest (1991, Belgium) explores how all types of mental images, in particular memory and reminiscence, are able to reappear in a technological form.Piece by piece, the artist appropriates contemporary technology to reveal both their nature as extensions for capturing the world and their potential as an artistic medium. Her work was recently exhibited at FRAC Grand Large (Dunkerque), “Shapeshifters” at the Malmö Museum, the Riga International Biennial “And suddenly it all blossoms” curated by Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, the Lyon Biennale “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water” curated by Palais de Tokyo, Lyon (France); The triennale of Okayama Art Summit 2019 “IF THE SNAKE” curated by Pierre Huyghe, Okayama (Japon); “Suspended time, Extended space”, Casino Luxembourg.

"Stay Home" is a graphic logbook, which I try to keep by putting my feelings into it during this quarantine. How I perceive it and there feel from day to day. By putting my own experiences and the feelings of people around me that I have on the phone or other social networks. It is a very singular moment of life, which I think will mark and change our society. The apprehension of after is very important, even worrying. How will it be after confinement? A normal life? This is a summary of my 55 days.

Arnaud Laffond is a video artist, plastic digitalis workbench based in Lyon. His work is characterized by the creation of virtual environments and materials generated by computer. The color, as the material brute, is numerically sculptured, treated and altered to be reborn in vibrating and bright architecture. His works are situated on the verge of science fiction, halfway between abstraction and the representationalism , utopia and dystopia, architecture and landscape. He works with diverse aspects of video, such as installation, animated gif and impression

Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa is a meditation on humanity’s massive redesign of the planet and a dystopic pamphlet on the anthropocene. Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa portrays a brief moment of euphoria as the drifting occupants on the raft, hoping and praying to be rescued, appear to glimpse a possibility of salvation. We can almost hear the hoarse cries through which they attempt to draw attention to their desperate plight, mustering a final ounce of strength before the void. This is their last chance of survival. Extraction: The Raft of the Medusa refers to the colonial paradigm, worldview, and technologies that mark out regions of high biodiversity in order to reduce life to its conversion into a resource through capitalism, with an enormous environmental and social impact. It is an allegory for states of emergency in environmental policy, climate and migration, with an ethical-political purpose.

Salomé Lamas (Lisbon) studied cinema in Lisbon and Prague, visual arts in Amsterdam and is a Ph. D candidate in contemporary art studies in Coimbra. Her work has been screened both in art venues and film festivals such as Berlinale, BAFICI, Museo Arte Reina Sofia, FIAC, MNAC – Museu do Chiado, DocLisboa, Cinema du Réel, Visions du Réel, MoMA – Museum of Modern Art, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Harvard Film Archive, Museum of Moving Images NY, Jewish Museum NY, Fid Marseille, Arsenal Institut fur film und videokunst, Viennale, Culturgest, CCB - Centro Cultural de Belém, Hong Kong FF, Museu Serralves, Tate Modern, CPH: DOX, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Bozar , Tabakalera, ICA London, TBA 21 Foundation, Mostra de São Paulo, CAC Vilnius, MALBA, FAEMA, SESC São Paulo, MAAT, La Biennale di Venezia Architettura, among others. Lamas was granted several fellowships such as the Gardner Film Study Center Fellowship – Harvard University, Film Study Center-Harvard Fellowship, The Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Brown Foundation – Dora Maar House, Fundación Botín, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Sundance, Bogliasco Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Camargo Foundation, Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. She collaborates with Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Elias Querejeta Zine Eskola. She collaborates with the production company O Som e a Fúria and is represented by Galeria Miguel Nabinho and Kubikgallery.

Recycler / Reprendre / Revoir / Refaire / Réadapter. Prenez un scalpel, coupez ces mots pour ne garder que le préfixe re-. Faites-en votre personnage principal, celui d’un détective. Placez-le parmi des mots macabres, des phrases sombres où la nuit ne cesse de pleuvoir. Une fois l’opération terminée, l’enquête peut commencer.

Maxime Le Moing respire à Metz (France). Depuis 10 ans, il est embauché à temps plein en tant que promeneur écoutant. Affilié à la pratique du maraîchage et de l'écriture sonore, il œuvre dans la radio, la poésie sonore, la performance musicale néo-animiste et le mash-up pour les oreilles. Ses créations sont ponctuées par les saisons: en hiver, il anime auprès du jeune publique des ateliers de poésies lettristes en leur enseignant le beat box; au printemps, il enregistre le son de la photosynthèse des plantes et élabore une thèse intitulée "La nature préfère la harsh-noise que la musique classique"; en été, il vagabonde avec sa trompette et sa mallette de bruiteur pour réanimer les espaces morts de la capitaloscène; en automne, il aménage des ronds-points, friches et petits bois pour remettre au goût la libre errance des rencontres sexuelles.

“The photo was taken using a painted board in Kuling Park on Lushan…” A woman is reminiscing about the story behind a photograph: it was a bright summer day in the 1980s. Her family traveled to Lushan to escape the heat. As her memory unfolds, we gradually come to see the forgotten history and that very photograph being damaged by water stain.

1985 Born in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, An experimental animation artist with his hands on video arts, painting, installation, music and VJ performance also. In 2009 He got a master's degree in animation from Tsinghua University. In 2010, his film This is LOVE was shown at Ottawa International Animation Festival and awarded The 2010 Best Narrative Short. In 2013 his film Recycled was the Winner Grand Prix shorts - non-narrative at Holland International Animation Film Festival. In 2014 he is the Jury of Zagreb / Holland International Animation Film Festival. and he was the winner of 2014 asian cultural council grant. In 2017 he works in CalArts Experimental Animation program as Faculty. In 2018 he invited for New Academy Member for the Short Films and Feature Animation branch. In 2019 his first feature film Breathless Animals has been selected by Berlinale Forum.

Deployment presents a body of work undertaken by Emmanuelle Léonard in 2018 during a research residency in the Canadian Far North sponsored by the Canadian Forces Artists Program. A continuation of the artist’s photographic and videographic projects from the past fifteen years, which focused on the hierarchies that form within social, judiciary, military and religious systems, this group of works pursues her interest in the function of authority and the mechanisms by which it is circumvented or undermined. Observing the exercises conducted to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, Léonard discovered a diverse set of realities: strategic military deployment in a region of the world where the national, political and economic stakes have been raised by global warming.(...) Despite conditions that make filming extremely difficult, Léonard captured the activities of soldiers shielded against the cold by clothing, face masks and goggles that make them appear sometimes spectral and anonymous, sometimes very real and individual. Turning her attention to training exercises that level identity as well as to the participants themselves – their perception of the world independent of the military model – the artist witnessed the waiting and the relative passivity of soldiers confronted with motors that refuse to start in the northern night that is so disquietingly slow to fall, if not entirely eclipsed, where nothing momentous is said, done or claimed. (Louise Déry - Director, Galezrie de l'UQAM - Université du Québec à Montréal)

My Random Diary is a juxtaposition of the adapted description as diary entries of unrelated events from various news archives and the photos taken during the site visits of the covered violent events. The randomness is attributed not only by the chances Leung Chi Wo made for his personal reflection from the scenes of violence, but also the celebratory events coincidently occurred on the same day exactly 50 years ago. From 2017, the artist began to visit to various locations where bomb attacks once took place during the 1967 Riots—a series of violent events boosting the complicate sentiments towards to colonial government in Hong Kong. On the same date, at the same location, exactly fifty years later, the artist captures the site and the sky above it with black and white film. The series evolves into an ongoing personal engagement of violent events from bombing to domestic conflicts, sexual assaults and gang fights. Through polysemy and polyphony, Leung systematizes the contemplation and conception of two kinds of parallel worlds: one temporally synchronous but spatially distant, another temporally distinct yet spatially unified.

Leung Chi Wo, co-founder of Para/Site Art Space, has widely exhibited internationally in major art institutions, including biennales in Venice, Shanghai and Gwangju, Queens Museum of Art in New York, Museu da Imagem e do Som in São Paulo, Tate Modern in London and Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai. His work has been reviewed in Yishu, Artforum International, Art Review, Leap, ArtAsiaPacific and New York Times, etc. He is Associate Professor in the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

C’est l’été en Normandie. Céline travaille sur un chantier de fouilles et en profites pour passer un week-end dans son village d'enfance, qu'elle n'a pas revu depuis longtemps. Ses recherches archéologiques se mêlent à des retrouvailles plus ou moins probables au fil de ses promenades.

Originaire de Normandie (France), Christelle Lheureux est cinéaste, artiste et enseignante. Elle vit à Paris (France) et enseigne à la Haute école d’art et de design de Genève (Suisse). Après une formation aux universités d’Amiens (France) et de Paris VIII (France), aux Beaux-Arts de Grenoble (France) et au Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing (France), elle réalise de nombreuses installations vidéo dans les années 2000, et participe à de nombreuses expositions, biennales et résidences d’art contemporain en Europe et en Asie. Dans les années 2010, elle réalise plusieurs courts et moyens-métrages primés dans des festivals de cinéma. Elle prépare actuellement "Le vent des crocodiles", son premier long-métrage avec Christmas in July (Julie Salvador), "Dans le ventre de la baleine", un moyen métrage en Thaïlande avec Kidam (François-Pierre Clavel), et termine "80 000 ans", un court métrage en diptyque.

Le film "HERstory" est un film composé d’une succession d’extraits de vidéos réalisées dans le cadre des différentes expositions entre 2017 et 2019 en France et au Maroc. Réalisés en public, ces portraits participent de la création d’archives où les artistes et des activistes s’expriment à propos l’intersectionnalité, des disparités entre les hommes et les femmes dans le monde de l’art, ou encore de leurs engagements féministes. Dans un souci constant d’accessibilité, les portraits vidéo ont été postés en ligne sur la chaine Youtube HERstory. Nous avons choisi de contourner l’Histoire (History) pour en proposer de nouveaux récits, de nouvelles voix et de nouvelles archives: HERstory. Nous, artiste et historienne de l’art, souhaitons nous engager pour rendre visible, faire circuler et archiver les paroles féministes, queer et décoloniales. HERstory est un espace de réflexions intersectionnelles, de paroles, d’échanges et fabrication d’archives.

Julie Crenn est docteure en histoire de l’art, critique d’art (AICA – Association internationale des critiques d’art) et commissaire d’exposition indépendante. En 2005, elle a obtenu un Master recherche en histoire et critique des arts à l’université Rennes 2 (France), dont le mémoire portait sur l’art de Frida Kahlo. Dans la continuité de ses recherches sur les pratiques féministes et postcoloniales, elle reçoit le titre de docteure en Arts (histoire et théorie) à l’Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III (France). Sa thèse est une réflexion sur les pratiques textiles contemporaines (de 1970 à nos jours). Des pratiques artistiques mettant en avant les thématiques de la mémoire, l’histoire, le genre et les identités (culturelles et sexuelles). Julie Crenn est commissaire associée à la programmation du Transpalette – centre d’art contemporain de Bourges (France) [2018-2020]. Elle est également membre du Comité Technique d’Acquisition du FRAC – Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Poitou-Charentes (France) [2014-2020]. En 2018, Julie Crenn est directrice artistique de la résidence Les Ateliers des Arques, Les Arques (France). Pascal Lièvre est un plasticien qui apparaît sur la scène de l’art contemporain au début des années 2000, avec une série de vidéos musicales où des textes politiques, psychanalytiques ou philosophiques sont chantés sur des musiques populaires. Il explore la figure de l’exception au droit d’auteur qu’est le droit de parodie en exploitant le potentiel critique de l’imitation. Sa pratique de la performance passe d’abord par des reenactments de performances historiques surtout d’artistes femmes et ensuite de mise en forme de corpus théoriques via des pratiques sportives comme l’aérobic ou la figure du défilé. Ses œuvres sur toile rejouent l’histoire de l’art avec des paillettes, une queerisation des formes iconiques de l’art contemporain. Ses dernières années, il travaille sur des corpus théoriques féministes sous forme d’installation vidéo, de performance ou d’œuvres graphiques

A fossil cast in plastic, an artificial plateau, classic cars running on the fumes of the nation. Ancient Sunshine traces a meandering path through coal extraction and climate defense in the American West. The film proposes solidarity against the violence by which "earth" becomes "resource." Utah Tar Sands Resistance has been fighting experimental mining in the Tavaputs Plateau for almost a decade, setting up camp every summer in sight of heavy equipment and construction crews. The film asks, how might the concept of horizontalism be applied to the physical horizon, its decimation, and to capital’s propensity for vertical extrication? Ancient Sunshine interweaves the endless remaking of the Western landscape with labor history, reflections on anarchist organization, and interspecies economies, such as animal husbandry. Toward a poetic solidarity, toward a formal politics.

Jason Livingston is a media artist, film programmer, and writer. His award-winning work has screened widely, including Rotterdam, Anthology, the Austrian Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Under Foot & Overstory is distributed by the CFMDC, and Lake Affect is available through EAI’s Experimental Television Center collection. Awarded residencies include the Millay Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Jason is pursuing a practice-based PhD as a Presidential Fellow with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He holds a B.A in Philosophy from Cornell University, and a M.A. and M.F.A. in Cinema from the University of Iowa. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees with the Flaherty Seminar.

Thanks to the rise of mining, post-communist Mongolia was the fastest growing economy in the world in 2012. However, the poor were not profiting from the booming industry, and climate change plus overgrazing were leading to vast desertification. According to Mongolian shamanistic belief, the earth and sky are connected. Violation of nature by men provokes the anger of the ruling spirits or the ‘masters of the land’ and leads to drought and pestilence. How does the population relate to its ancestors when desires threaten to upset the cosmic balance? The film opens with images shot in Baganuur and Nalaikh, once the largest coal mines in Mongolia. Fixed camera images of workers in the shadow of gigantic machines alternate with desolate landscapes and downtown Ulaanbaatar by day and by night. Intermediate texts cut the medium long shots. The first excerpt originates from the Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhasz. In 1957, under the influence of LSD, he experienced the painful initiation of a shaman. The second excerpt comes from a song by the shamaness Kyrgys Khurak. It deals with the evocation of lurking greed and inequality that might destroy nature – an aspect that implicitly refers to the climate crisis. (Ive Stevenheydens)

The long-term projects of photographer and filmmaker Jan Locus study the complexity of worldwide, socio-political issues. His books include Mongolia, De Bewegende Stad and Devoted. His films have been screened at IFFR Rotterdam (NL), DokFest Kassel (DE), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (DE), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE), Asolo Art Film Festival (IT), Split International Festival of New Film (HR) and FIFA Montreal (CA) among others. He lives and works in Brussels.

A small town in western Germany is the last stop for 26,000 pigs per day and a temporary home for masses of Eastern European temporary workers. The workers of the largest slaughterhouse in the country are fighting for survival, while German activists who stand up for their rights, are fighting against the local authorities. At the same time, Munich high school students are working on the play "Saint Joan of the Stockyards" and trying to grasp the old text and German capitalism of our days. Interwoven with the thoughts of the young people and their examination of the text in the rehearsals, the film deals in various fragments with conditions and facets of temporary work and labour migration in Germany.

Yulia Lokshina was born 1986 in Moscow. Since 2011 she studies documentary directing at the Munich filmschool HFF München. Her documentary film and video works deal with the interference of social environments and their protagonists. Her film „Days of youth“ on a military patriotic youth camp in the east Russian periphery examines the connection of patriotism and education and was awarded the Starter film prize of the city of Munich 2017. In the framework of her involvement with the Forum of international Science at the University of Bonn she works on audio-visual projects between film and scientific research. For 2018 she was awarded the 12th media art yearly scholarship of the Kirch foundation (Munich). "Rules of the Assembly Line“, her graduation film, was awarded the prize for best documentary film at the Festival Max Ophüls Preis 2020, the „Megaherz Student Award“ at Dok.fest Munich 2020 and the “Healthy Workplaces Award” at Doclisboa 2020. Currently Yulia started an artistic PhD project on documentary adaptation at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg.

Refusing to pay for the debt, two Athenians decide to leave their city. Guided by mysterious crow calls, they wander through a desolate urban landscape until they reach a zone of passage and are spirited to an ancient forest, the Realm of the Birds. Here they meet the Hoopoe, half-bird half-woman, who tells them how the birds live by sharing their resources amid the magical forces of the forest. However, one of the men has other plans for the birds. Though far from easy, the inter-species encounter will be illuminating for all. Some 2,500 years after it was written, an experimental adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Birds. Between a contemporary Athens marked by crisis and the surviving Laurisilva Forest of La Gomera, Ancient Greek and Silbo (an endangered whistled language that forms part of a long tradition of resistance), comes a tale of flight, loss and reenchantment in a space of refuge where new alliances can emerge between different species, temporalities and languages.

Silvia MAGLIONI and GRAEME THOMSON are filmmakers and artists whose work explores the porous boundaries between fiction and documentary, cinema and the visual arts. Their work has been screened in festivals around the world, including FID-Marseille, IFF Rotterdam, Anthology Film Archives, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Thessaloniki IFF, Berlin Critics Week, Bafici, Jihlava, Festival Hors-Pistes, Docs Kingdom.

A sudden immersion into the mysterious and savage waters of the autonomous carnaval in Marseille. With the city center in a gentrification limbo, the carnaval troops occupy the streets, searching, intertwining. Limbs tear out a part of the present and the troops go on to attack the winter.

Ultrasocial Pop is Filip Markiewicz’s latest experimental audio visual project. Creating a performative dialogue between his visual and filmic work and his musical compositions as Raftside. The live performance is always a unique experience that includes a comment on actual social events. The idea is to question the link between pop culture and populism and to create a videographic moving painting. The work in progress of Ultrasocial Pop will lead to the release of a visual book with vinyl Lp (Label Grzegorzki Records) in the frame of his solo show at Haus am Lützowplatz in Berlin (D) in May 2021. Ultrasocial Pop is supported by the Bourse Bert-Theis.

Filip Markiewicz was born in Esch-sur-Alzette (L) in 1980. His solo shows have been hosted by institutions such as the MNAC National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (RO), NN Contemporay Art in Northampton (UK), Kunsthalle Osnabrück in Osnabrück (D), CCA Derry -Londonderry (UK) an the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'Art Contemporain (L). He represented Luxembourg at the 56th Biennial in Venice. Markiewicz follows a theatrical and musical performance route, which has led him to create shows at the Staatstheater Cottbus for the Lausitz Festival (D), Theater Basel in Basel (CH) and the Expo in Shanghai (CHN), to his work in the visual arts field. He lives and works in Hamburg (D) and Luxembourg (L)

Finding access to the deeper levels and truths of a stretch of land via the surreal, the digitally alienated. Thus is the aim behind Lukas Marxt’s Imperial Irrigation, whereby digital surrealism is anchored in an experimental documentary intent, while text and sound levels snarl the multiple layers of action thus continually decentering the narrative. Starting point for this complex and vibrant territorial study is California’s Salton Sea; close to where Marxt’s Imperial Valley (cultivated run-off) already led. The visual approach to this slowly drying up lake and its highly checkered past takes place through various types of images—most of which have been implanted with elaborately placed, willful moments of alienation. As though the intangibility of the scenery offered could not possibly be encountered via veristic means, the shots are digitally chopped, extended by time stops, permeated by undefinable MacGuffins—and tremble erratically owing to air reflections that arise when filming from a great distance. Marxt does not exclude himself from this quasi-colonial inspection of a landscape. His cowboy boots, his snakeskin hat, and his hanging out at slot machines or in the car repeatedly intervene as idiosyncratic presences in the flow of images. The artist Julia Scher emphatically narrates a history of Salton Sea based on a text by William L. Fox recapitulating various discursive anchoring moments. At the same time, subtly woven sound elements, most notably insistent passages by the musician Jung An Tagen, for their part, “alter-medially” outdo the “insane sense” of the events. What emerges is a disturbing portrait of a bit of the Anthropocene, whose ongoing catastrophic course, the film sums up nicely. (Christian Höller)

Lukas Marxt (*1983, Austria) is an artist and a filmmaker living and working between Cologne and Graz. Marxt´s interest in the dialogue between human and geological existence, and the impact of man upon nature was first explored in his studies of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Graz, and was further developed through his audio visual studies at the Art University in Linz. He received his MFA from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and attended the postgraduate programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. Marxt has been sharing his research in the visual art environment as well as in the cinema context. His works have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently at the Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2018), at The Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Belgium, 2018), and at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka (Croatia, 2018). His films have been presented in numerous International Film Festivals including Berlinale (Germany, 2017 and 2018), Curtas Vila do Conde (Portugal, 2018), and the Gijón International Film Festival where he receiced the Principado de Asturias prize for the best short film (Spain, 2018). Since 2017, Marxt has spent a considerable amount of time in Southern California, where he has researched the ecological and socio-political structures surrounding the Salton Sea.

The major video screening set up echoes the documentary Condivisione di un ricordo: this work presents the operation which concerned Bergamo and the municipalities of the Val Seriana over the summer, in which numerous posters portraying Pellizza’s painting were displayed, thanks to the involvement of people encountered by the artists.

The two artists have worked together since 1999, focusing on video art and installations. They express themselves through the language of video, and in different forms such as performance, theater, installation, photography and recently cinema. In Italy they are recognized among the most important video artists and innovators in the field of contemporary art. Their artistic research has focused on the theme of incommunicability, highlighting the paradox of our communication society. This has led them to produce very intimate pieces alongside work with a greater anthropological, social, and political feel. They strive to engage their audience by using the moving image as an immersive installation. MASBEDO have also worked with video-performances to engage their audience within the creative space and gestures created by the video itself