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Frances Scott
Aureole
Experimental film | 16mm | color | 7:32 | United Kingdom | 2021
In meteorology, the aureole is an atmospheric, optical phenomenon; the visible inner disc of a corona, produced by the diffraction of light from the sun or the moon, bright starlight or planet-light. Aureole brings together unused celestial images from Scott’s earlier film, Diviner (2017), with vocoder-readings from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), scored by Chu-Li Shewring’s remix of the House track Brighter Days (1992) by Cajmere featuring Dajae. Aureole is a transition between a ‘lost’ chapter from Diviner and Wendy (2022, forthcoming), a film fan-letter to composer Wendy Carlos, whose many interests include solar eclipse photography. Accelerating to a euphoric end, the film is the duration of the longest total solar eclipse, when the moon completely covers the sun.
Frances Scott (b. 1981) is a London-based artist working with moving image. Her work considers the narratives and histories at the periphery of cinematic production and its apparatus, to produce films composed of their metonymic fragments. Her projects are often made in exchange with other specialists, groups and publics, and developed through research using online and physical archives and collections. She associates and composites diverse materials, analogue and digital film media, to create intricate scenarios that are both scripted and improvised. Her film work, informed by this collaborative and research-led process, takes multiple forms, through exhibitions to installations, screenings, events, broadcasts and publications, including recent presentations at: transmediale x CTM, Berlin; 57th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, New York; Edge of Frame & Close Up Film Centre, London; Het Bos, Antwerp; The Bower, London; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; Annely Juda Fine Art & The Russian Club, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park & Art Licks; South West Film & Television Archive, Plymouth; and Focal Point Gallery, Southend. Frances Scott was recipient of the Stuart Croft Foundation Moving Image Award (2017), and is currently working on a new film commissioned by TACO!, London for a solo exhibition and publication in 2022.
Sibi Sekar
Of Other Spaces
Video | 4k | color | 24:0 | India | 2021
Through episodes that display a high degree of idiosyncrasy, we follow a stranger who creates an imaginary order which serves to stress his inexistence elsewhere. The film is a personal documentary that represents a constellation of past time and suspended time while attempting to explore the Foucauldian phrase 'a placeless place'.
Sibi Sekar was born on April 29th, 1997 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Sibi fell in love with cinema at an early age upon viewing the works of artists such as Luis Buñuel and Sergei Parajanov. Sibi began making experimental films and directed a few short films ("Thoughts Out Of Season", “Night Train Light On Track“, “Teal City” and "Representation") while doing his postgraduation in Humanities and Social Sciences. He launched the SSSW banner during the 2020 pandemic and made a few more short films ("On Floating Bodies", "The Tale of the Entry/Exit", "you are, i am" and "Of Other Spaces") under said banner. They have been screened at over thirty festivals across five continents. He usually works on explorative films that are primarily an ascetic representation of resistance and the thematic dispositions of his films concern the symbolic depiction of being, nothingness and the transcendental space.
Ekaterina Selenkina
Obkhodniye puti
Experimental fiction | 16mm | color | 73:0 | Russia | 2021
A sprawling meditation on the choreography of bodies in Moscow’s urban landscape, Detours depicts a new way of dealing illicit drugs via the Darknet, the layering of the physical and the virtual realities, as well as a poetics, and politics, of space. Taking place in sleepy neighbourhoods, among the concrete walls of high-rises, behind garages and amidst abandoned railroads, the film alternately follows and loses track of Denis, the treasureman who hides stashes of drugs all over the city.
Ekaterina Selenkina is a filmmaker, artist and curator born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1992. Her work showed at Venice International Film Critics’ Week, Viennale, Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Garage Museum of Modern Art, Camerimage, Pacific Meridian, Message to Man, New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival, REDCAT arts center, among others. Together with Zaina Bseiso, Luis Gutiérrez Arias and Joie Estrella Horwitz, she is a member of the film collective called Bahía Colectiva and co-curator of Adrift Residency. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts and is currently based in Moscow.
Shireen Seno
To Pick a Flower
Experimental doc. | hdv | color and b&w | 16:57 | Philippines | 2021
My mother used to tell me that our dining table was as old as I am. I wonder how old the tree was when it was cut down to be turned into our table. I am fascinated in this kind of transmutation from the natural world to the human one, and how a tree takes on new lives long after it has been cut down. This video essay incorporates archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the sticky relationship between humans and nature and their entanglements with empire. Taking plants and trees as starting points, it aims to reflect on the intertwined roots of photography and capitalism in the Philippines.
Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker based in Manila whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at festivals including New Directors/New Films, Yebisu International Festival of Art & Alternative Visions, NYFF Currents, and institutions such as Tate Modern, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Portikus.
John Smith
Covid Messages
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 22:16 | United Kingdom | 2020
'Covid Messages' is a video work in six parts, based around broadcasts of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The work focusses on the British government’s attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals. While the pandemic spreads and the death toll rises, the Prime Minister makes repeated errors of judgement. Exasperated by his many mistakes, the spirits of the dead rise up and intervene.
John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952 and studied at the Royal College of Art, after which he became an active member of the London Filmmakers' Co-op. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he is renowned for a diverse body of work that subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation and abstraction, playfully exploring and exposing the language of cinema. Since 1972 he has made over sixty film, video and installation works that have been shown in museums, galleries and independent cinemas around the world. Smith’s solo exhibitions include Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Centre d'Art Contemporain de Noisy-le-Sec, Paris; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Weserburg Museum for Modern Art, Bremen; Uppsala Art Museum, Sweden and Royal College of Art Galleries, London. His work is held in public collections that include Tate Gallery; Arts Council England; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; FRAC Île de France, Paris and Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, Magdeburg.
Freja Sofie Kirk
B Plots
Video | hdv | color | 6:30 | Denmark | 2020
Joanna is a singer who performs in a bar six nights a week, inside a hotel where she lives a few floors below. Her voice guides us through her work routine and the circular route between her room and the stage, all while the video continuously interrupts itself, disrupting the linearity of her story. 'B Plots' looks into the connection between images and physical spaces and how they mirror and affect each other. The mechanic movements of the camera are not hidden, but amplified, directing ones attention towards the camera as a medium and the materiality of the video.
Freja Sofie Kirk works within video, photography and installation, often in connection with one another. Through her ongoing work with two-dimensional representations, Kirk’s practice investigates how images generate meaning in contemporary society. 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, Kirk attempts to renegotiate the power relations inherent in both architecture and image production.
Malte Steiner
The Big Crash VR
Experimental VR | 0 | color | 0:0 | Germany, Denmark | 2019
The Big Crash VR is a nonlinear immersive virtual reality artpiece based on data mined from real estate sites. The audience experience it either on an Oculus Quest headset within an exhibition context or online with a desktop browser or the one within a VR device. This piece is part of Malte Steiner's art project The Big Crash. The thematic departure point is the instability of the real estate market as a consequence of extreme gentrification. Something that is actively taking place in all bigger cities around the globe. There is a pending ‘big bubble crash’ awaiting as a consequence of this and the piece deals with the growing instability this movement creates and its effects on society. The VR world is build with graphical artifacts derived from real estate ads from Berlin with a custom software. Images from these ads are segmented into objects by a Machine Learning algorithm and used to create a surreal architecture in the 3D environment. Sound based on the data from the prices and square meters over a span of several months provides an additional layer.
Malte Steiner (born 1970) is a German media artist, electronic musician and composer, currently living in Aalborg in Denmark. Steiner started creating electronic music and visual art around 1983, developing his own vision of the interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk, working with, and not limited to, film, theater, paintings, video games, interactive installations and sound. First exhibitions already in 1983. In 1986 Steiner took a course in electro-acoustic music in Lüneburg by H.W. Erdmann and gave his first live performances in the following years, e. g. in Germany, France and Belgium and started 1987 to release his music on cassette, later on vinyl, CD and online. Steiner was a co-founder of the Hörbar club for experimental music located in Hamburg (DE), which opened in 1991 and is still active today. In 1998 he started creating electronic art and installations and in 2003 additionally several netart projects including a collaborative visual networking environment, shown in the Java museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2011 Steiner moved to Berlin, where he opened his own non-public media lab block 4. Besides diverse music projects Steiner is also involved in several open source projects and has done lectures, radio features and workshops. 2018 he relocated to Aalborg, Denmark.
Wouter Stroet
So Settler, Are You a Pioneer?
Animation | mp4 | color | 6:43 | Netherlands | 2020
‘So Settler, Are You a Pioneer?’ captures the structures of a rapidly changing peripheral neighbourhood: material remains of an obsolete infrastructure, luxury apartments, and piles of bricks that once used to house people. The work re-assembles and digitally preserves sites that are often overlooked in tales of linear progress. The piece is a journey through distorted urban landscapes, an assemblage of partial perspectives. By adapting the cartographic technique of photogrammetry, Wouter aims to question the authorities who decide what is and what is not in focus.
Through unravelling tales of linear progression I seek to map out the blurriness of our world. By adapting and appropriating modern contemporary cartographic techniques, such as photogrammetry, and the use of aerial and satellite imagery. I aim to question the authority that decides what is and what is not in focus to re-orient and ignite curiosity. Currently I am active as an artist and graphic designer. Besides my individual practice I collobarate in communal projects, one being OUTLINE; a collective and publishing platform consisting of one other graphic designer and two photographers. Another one being Radio Voorwaarts which is a platfom for underground culture in Amsterdam. More recently: Verdedig Noord, an activist group fighting against gentrification in Amsterdam Noord.
Marko Tadic
Dogadjaji za zaboraviti
Animation | 16mm | color | 6:0 | Croatia | 2020
Filmed on 16mm film, this visual expression is rooted in archival materials and based on a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It speaks of forgotten people, their lives and their deeds. These two Archives were found at a flea market in Zagreb. One is of a famous architect and the other of a famous composer. The film ponders on this occurrence, as well as on the vanishing and forgetfulness of humans.
Marko Tadic (1979) studied painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence. His artistic practice focuses on drawing, installation and animation. He has won numerous art prizes. His films have been shown at many international animation and experimental film festivals. His works have been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions around the world. In 2017, he represented Croatia at the 57th Venice Biennale, along with Tina Gverovic. He participated in residential programs in Helsinki, New York, Los Angeles, Frankfurt and Vienna. He works at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Croatia.
Maryam Tafakory
Nazarbazi
Experimental film | 35mm | color | 19:54 | Iran | 2021
Nazarbazi [the play of glances] is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited.
Maryam Tafakory is an artist filmmaker based between London and Shiraz. Her work has been exhibited internationally including MoMA Doc Fortnight; IFF Rotterdam; Edinburgh EIFF; Melbourne MIFF; True/False festival; Zurich Film Festival; Whitechapel Gallery; Pergamon Museum; M HKA; and Anthology Film Archives amongst others. She has received several awards including, the Ammodo Tiger Short at 51st IFFR, the First Jury Prize at DocumentaMadrid, the Best Short Film at Festival de Cine Lima Independiente, and she was the 2019 Flaherty/Colgate Distinguished Global Filmmaker in Residence, NY. Her work has appeared at Criterion's The Daily, the Sight&Sound magazine, Filmmaker Magazine, and Senses of Cinema.
Patrick Tarrant
Frankston
Experimental doc. | 16mm | color | 21:16 | Australia | 2020
Frankston is a study of the place I grew up, a satellite of Melbourne with affordable housing, nature-strips and beach views. The downright ordinary nature of the opportunities and festivities afforded by Frankston, and the ambivalence one can feel going back there, nonetheless give rise to a new aesthetic: the suburban symphony. In this case the symphony is rendered in strange hues and luminescences as though affirming Robin Boyd’s depiction of ‘the Australian ugliness’ in 1960, where he claims that “taste has become so dulled and calloused that anything which can startle a response on jaded retinas is deemed successful.”
Patrick Tarrant (Melbourne, 1969) is an Associate Professor in filmmaking at London South Bank University who has written on feature-length portrait films such as Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Two Years At Sea and Manakamana. Patrick has made video portraits and observational city films, while developing a hybrid filmmaking method that brings digital video and a 16mm film projector together (in The Take-Up, The Trembling Giant & Another Self Portrait ). Patrick has had films screened at the Hong Kong, Cork and Melbourne International Film Festivals, and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2016 London Film Festival.
Brad Todd
3050 K
Video | mp4 | color | 9:27 | Canada | 2021
3050 K is an AI/Neural Net project which utilizes imagery of stage lighting (floods, spots, footlights, gels) sourced from 70 concerts and performances of rock music from the 1970’s. These images are in turn used as primary material for a Neural Net and provide the training model for the resultant imagery. The images which are generated from this process are visualizations of emergent forms and tableau which are the offspring of the original material. These images are then re-processed and provide the individual frames for a video representation of the GAN’s procedural and generative algorithmic creation. The hypnotic and somnambulant visuals are accompanied by a score I created, composed of a number of heavily processed aural artifacts from the era. The title ’3050 K’ is in reference to the average number of Kelvins used in stage and theatrical lighting.
Brad Todd is an artist whose works span several fields of inquiry, principally involving the research/creation of responsive environments which implicate technology as a mirror, filter and catalyst for experience writ large in both an individually embodied sense and its attendant broader socio-political context. Recent and past projects have focused on issues of visualizing and conditioning invisible, abstract and liminal material such as EMF, infrasonics, aggregate data and microclimates, while in other works the content is more explicit and political. Having received an M.F.A. from Concordia University (Montréal), he began playing music in the post-punk band Sofa, which released the inaugural album and single on the Constellation Records label. From the generative and reactive to the composed and performative, audio and sound design continues to play a key role in his works. Brad has received numerous grants and awards and has exhibited his works in galleries and media festivals in North America, South and Central America, Asia and Europe. Presently he is an instructor in the Design and Computation Arts program at Concordia University in Montréal.
Peter Treherne
The Names of Things
Documentary | mov | color | 17:38 | United Kingdom | 2021
A bed-bound woman's year passes as a day: her time is no longer measured by the increments of a clock but by the quality of weather outside her window. Objects emerge and merge in the gloom; the woman dissolves and reforms. Her muteness, her glaucomas and her inactivity render things indeterminate. By naming objects, animal and phenomena we reduce and delineate them, and so separate ourselves from the world around us - she cannot do this.
Peter Treherne is a moving image artist working in the South East of England. His films explore the affects of the environment, particularly weather, on agricultural and creative labour. His work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Kinoscope, has been funded by Arts Council England, and has screened internationally at festivals and galleries including Festival ECRA, Whitechapel Gallery and London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Peter is also director of the Slow Film Festival, an organisation that shares moving image art with the British public in rural areas. The festival has collaborated on programmes with institutions including Close-Up Film Centre, MUBI and the British Council, and has screened work from artists including Ben Rivers, Kevin Jerome Everson, Babette Mangolte and James Benning. Peter also holds a master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford.
Joëlle Tuerlinckx
The Single Screen
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 135:32 | Belgium, USA | 2021
The key work, The Single Screen, provides an insight into the series of performances that Joëlle Tuerlinckx and her ‘That's it!’-team brought to the world-renowned museum Dia Beacon (US) between 2015 and 2018 invited by Jessica Morgan (Nathalie de Gunsberg Director, Dia Art Foundation). As such, the artist confronts, in a conceptual and humorous way, the experience of time and space at a museum with that of a cinema. On a projection screen, the space expands, overflows, unfolds its topics, double and multiple. A co-production by Escautville, Dia Art Foundation, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) and S.M.A.K. (Ghent, BE).
Since the 1990s, and mainly after her participation in Documenta 11 in 2002, the artistic journey of the Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (°1958) has gained momentum, with solo and group exhibitions in major institutions around the world (including the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2009, the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2013, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg in 2014 and her participation in Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017). Today Tuerlinckx is among the most internationally renowned Belgian artists of her generation.
Christopher Tym
a.o.k
Video | 4k | color | 14:19 | United Kingdom | 2022
a.o.k is about the experience of making pop videos and pop music. Using only behind the scenes and B-roll footage altered with animations, it is a painting of the emotional experience behind and in front of the camera. It is as much about the content as it is about the making of it. The project revolves around a series of music videos created to original tracks but the end results are neither seen nor heard; what remains visible, however, are the sensations of the contributors during the production. It is a journey that cramps with discomfort at the beginning but opens up, softens and releases into something tender and compassionate. The result is relentless and unforgiving but it is an ode to the loving images we create of ourselves.
Christopher Tym (UK) is a Visual Artist based in Amsterdam. His practice includes Film-making, Animation and Audio-Visual Installations. He creates liminal spaces in moving image using unreliable framing, affective editing and by exploring the relationship between the camera and the body. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2012 and the Royal College of Art UK in 2017. He teaches Animation and tutors at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.
Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh
Chalo Una
Experimental doc. | mov | color | 95:30 | India, Austria | 2021
In August 2016, one of the largest dalit anti-caste protest-rally happened in recent history of India. The 10-day rally marched from Ahmedabad to Una in solidarity with four people who had been flogged in Una in an act of caste-related violence. Chalo Una is an intimate look at the remains of this rally. Shot three years to the date of the original rally, the film retraces its path, going to various sites of village meetings, protests, and so on. The film is an invitation to the audience to revisit and to be with the rally. The high-speed shots of these sites of protest are not only acts of memory but also are a trigger for another temporality, one that is disconnected from when it was shot. Retellings and memories of various people involved with the rally are layered with the images to further evoke the ghosts of this protest.
ujjwal kanishka utkarsh is a Phd-in-Practice candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He has been trying to develop a form that emerges out of the observational cinema tradition and he continues to do that through his PhD project. For ujjwal, this has resonances with John Cage's ideas of beauty and he has explored that through various forms and themes. He has looked at ideas of nothingness, of being in transit and also at labour practices, specifically at peculiar farming practices. In his current ongoing work, he is trying to see if and how through this form he can look at and reflect upon political activity. In the current political situation, where the space for voice of dissent is rapidly diminishing, truth is either viewed very simplistically and reality as objective or the post modern perspective renders all truth relative and all reality socially constructed. In this context, this is also an exploration to see if such ideas of observational form could create a space that avoids pitfalls of both these seemingly untenable theoretical extremes.
Michiel Van Bakel
Bogwaters
Video | 4k | color and b&w | 4:30 | Netherlands | 2021
In a Dutch wetland nature reserve we move across the water surface.* The images accelerate and change to infrared; we see the nature sanctuary as through the eyes of the dragonfly that can 'see' many times faster than a human being possibly can perceive. The flight ends where several canals meet; by the water at the foot of a silent witness, a timeless, overgrown bunker. *Striking fact: the former peat exploitation waterways of the Peel bog area have grown themselves into protected nature reserves in the midst of extremely industrial livestock production.
Michiel van Bakel (1966, Deurne NL) studied astronomy (Leiden university) and psychology (Nijmegen university) for several years before he chose for autonomous visual art, at art school (Den Haag and Arnhem). Van Bakel expresses himself through 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 man and technology, perception of time in our delicate man-made ecosystem.
Wendelien Van Oldenborgh
Hier.
Experimental doc. | 4k | color | 27:34 | Netherlands | 2021
Hier.(2021) moves seamlessly between politically charged reflections and personal memories through a constellation of voices and lyrical material. In Museum Arnhem (NL) during its renovation - a place of conservation in transition - we meet a cast of young women who express themselves through music, poetry and dialogue. Together they sensitively explore themes such as hybridity, trans-nationality and diasporic sensitivities in the midst of persistent reverberations of colonial history in contemporary society. Alongside the cast, the location Museum Arnhem, is also a meaningful “voice”. Originally built in the late 19th century as an ‘outdoors club’ by people with a colonial past, we see the building stripped down to its foundation, with worn concrete and elegant art nouveau features located next to each other. In this site of rubble and potential we follow three ‘sonic lines’: the band FRED, poet Pelumi Adejumo and historian Lara Nuberg. With music and poetry, we encounter not only socio-political urgencies, but also undercurrents of existentialist and vulnerable themes. Tenderly yet confident, we see the protagonists in friendship and cooperation, we hear about love, the sorrow that comes with it, life questions and certainties, by which they express the basis for a changing possible future.
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. Recent solo presentations include: work, work, work (work) at Museum Sztuki in Lodz 2021; tono lengua boca at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona 2020 and CA2M Madrid 2019-20; Cinema Olanda, at the Dutch Pavilion in the 57th Venice Biennial 2017. Van Oldenborgh has exhibited widely including the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, bauhaus imaginista, HKW Berlin 2019, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam 2020 and Sonsbeek20->24, Arnhem 2021.
Karl Van Welden
Images For Mars II
Video | 4k | color | 28:37 | Belgium | 2019
In the life-sized video work IMAGES FOR MARS II Karl Van Welden investigates the effect of a disaster on the human body. People in a state of carelessness until a dark ash rain falls upon them, turning their idyll into a catastrophe. Or how a blissful moment becomes a scene of charred bodies on a patch of scorched earth. The choreography and movements are inspired by archaeological finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum, which literally show the positions of bodies at the moment of a catastrophe. After the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano, its victims were enclosed by ashes. In time, the bodies disintegrated while the ash surrounding them solidified, creating cavities. Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli filled these cavities with plaster, creating a very precise image of the victims of this natural disaster. They remind us of the marble figures on medieval tombs. Sleeping beauties and tormented bodies, which reflect the Eros and the Thanatos of our relationship with the end.
More than ten years ago Karl Van Welden initiated United Planets, a cycle of visual and performative work based on terrestrial or human presence in the universe. How does humankind relate to the immensity of the universe? Using the planets in our solar system as anchor points, he searches for artistic answers to this fundamental question. The work comprises performances as MARS, PLUTO, MERCURY or SATURN, but also video, installations, interventions, drawings, paintings and three-dimensional works, which can act as reflections, preliminary studies, but could just as easily exist autonomously or be combined into one work. Whether sound or image with these works the artist explores multilayeredness, balancing between autonomous poetics and subtle references to social or political themes. His work has been shown in a variety of contexts such as Kaaitheater, Beursschouwburg, Vooruit, M HKA, KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Festival of Flanders, Concertgebouw Bruges, Marion de Cannière, Frascati (NL), Brakke Grond (NL), Metropolis (DK), Pact Zollverein (DE), Østfold Kulturutvikling (NO), le CENTQUATRE-PARIS (FR), Marseille Provence 2013 (FR), Le Vivat (FR), Uzès Danse (FR), Arsenal (FR), Naves Matadero (ES), Tokyo Wonder Site - TOKAS (JP), Gessnerallee Zürich (CH), Sonica (UK), Venice Art Biennale (IT) and Art Basel Hong Kong (HK).
Emilio Vavarella
Genesis (The Other Shapes of Me)
Video | 4k | black and white | 21:36 | Italy | 2021
The film Genesis (The Other Shapes of Me) is simultaneously a part of the installation rs548049170_1_69869_TT as well as a stand-alone art film. The film documents a year-long performance during which a large piece of fabric that codifies and contains all of my genetic information is woven by my mother on one of the first computers of history, the Jacquard loom. In the tension between the loving gestures of a mother and the automatic movements of a mechanical loom, Genesis gives form to my reflections on technical reproducibility, the materiality of information, and on the interplay between biological, mechanical and computational life. The series The Other Shapes of Me is based on the translation of my genetic code into fabric. This stratified series of interrelated works is the result of my research into the origin and current applications of binary technology: from weaving to programming, algorithms, software, automation processes, up to the complete computerization of a human being.
Emilio Vavarella is an Italian artist working at the intersection of interdisciplinary art practice, theoretical research and media experimentation. His work explores the relationship between subjectivity, nonhuman creativity and technological power. It is informed by the history of conceptual art, digital and network cultures, and new media practices. Vavarella moves seamlessly between old and new media, and exploits technical errors and other unpredictabilities to reveal the logic and the hidden structures of power. Esteemed venues that have exhibited Vavarella’s work include: MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo; KANAL – Centre Pompidou; Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna; Museum of Contemporary Art – Zagreb; Museu de Ciències Naturals of Barcelona, The Photographer’s Gallery of London, Museo de Arte de Caldas; Museo Nacional Bellas Artes in Santiago; Museu das Comunicações of Lisbon, National Art Center of Tokyo; Eyebeam Art and Technology Center and Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina. His artworks have been exhibited at film festivals such as Toronto’s Images Festival; Torino Film Festival, and the St. Louis International Film Festival, and at many international media art festivals, among which: EMAF – European Media Art Festival; JMAF – Japan Media Arts Festival; Stuttgarter Filmwinter – Festival for Expanded Media; BVAM – Media Art Biennale; and NYEAF – New York Electronic Arts Festival. Vavarella has been awarded numerous art prizes and grants, among which the Exibart Art Prize (2020); Italian Council award (2019); Premio Fattori Contemporaneo (2019); SIAE – Nuove Opere (2019); the NYSCA Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds grant (2016); the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Art (2015) and the Movin’Up Grant (2015). He has been invited to present his work at: Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative; Istituto Italiano di Cultura – New York; ISEA – International Symposium on Electronic Arts; Goldsmiths University of London; the University of East London; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and SIGGRAPH. His academic writings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Leonardo – The Journal of the International Society of the Arts, Sciences and Technology (MIT Press), Digital Creativity (Routledge), and CITAR Journal – Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts. His writings have also appeared in Behind the Smart World: Saving, Deleting and Resurfacing Data produced by the AMRO Research Lab and in exhibition catalogues like Low Form: Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (MAXXI and CURA Books); That’s IT! (MAMbo), and Robot Love (Niet Normaal Foundation). His work is regularly discussed in art magazines, academic books and peer-reviewed journals, and has been covered by all major global media outlets. His most recent artist book, published by Mousse, is entitled rs548049170_1_69869_TT. Vavarella is currently working toward a PhD in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard University and is the artist in residence of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He holds an M.A. cum laude in Visual Arts from Iuav University of Venice, with study abroad fellowships at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Tel Aviv and Bilgi University of Istanbul and received a B.A. cum laude in Visual, Cultural, and Media Studies from the University of Bologna.
Matthijs Vuijk
With the Whole World Crumbling, We Pick This Time to Fall In Love
Experimental VR | 0 | color | 7:0 | Netherlands, South Africa | 2021
This immersive experience includes three-dimensional scans combined with voice-memos, images, videos and WhatsApp messages which together form an assemblage of distant yet intimate encounters with friends and subjects. The viewer is able to walk through a personal and emotional digital landscape, creating their own non-linear narrative between dream and reality, a liminal space of longing.
Matthijs Vuijk (1995, NL) is an independent new media artist and filmmaker who has been studying photography at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Ghent, Belgium, from which he graduated with distinction. After doing an internship with Dutch filmmaker Lara Verheijden, Matthijs moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. There Matthijs finished a Bachelor Honours in Film & Television at the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS) with distinction and participated in a collaborative VR project between the Filmuniversität Babelsberg and WITS. Matthijs’ background in visual art, film and VR encompass his passion, which lies in the creation of captivating worlds through a strong visual atmosphere. He is formally and technically interested in different mediums while the important narrative factors within his work have a strong emphasis on emotions, intimacy and connection. His recent collaborative film What do I see when I see me with Sammie Straub has been selected at the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2021, while Matthijs’ newest immersive experience With the Whole World Crumbling, We Pick this Time to Fall in Love participates in the 2021 edition of the Fak’ugesi Digital Innovation Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa. His collaborative graduation film Sikelela Tapes was selected for the ‘Frontlight’ competition of the renowned International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and had its world premier at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) in Tanzania. Matthijs is currently involved in different cultural initiatives in both Johannesburg and Amsterdam.