Catalogue 2023-2024

CARGO CARRIERS is a story about a dreamy landscape and well-known architecture: in the perfect picture of the scene, noise fields break through the idyllic surroundings. The soundscape of the island is created by the prohibition of any kind of vehicle. For the transport of all goods, "carrying guys", independent workers with special carts, are employed. By means of experimental camera work, field recording and contemporary Chinese poetry, the tension between historical world cultural heritage, tourism, precarious work situations and life is negotiated.

Conny Zenk is media artist and film maker working in the context of social and urban architecture. Her working method is transdisciplinary and artistically explorative using digital and analog interfaces, vehicles and media. She is the initiator of the art project RAD Performance, which focuses on the fusion of performance and sound art with collective practices such as cycling. Since 2007 she has been working in the field of visual music in the context of performance, dance, theatre, and sound art, reflecting on concepts such as space and projection and creating a dialogue of visual music and light architecture. International festivals such as Rencontres Internationales, Vienna Shorts, Festival du Nouveau Cinema Montreal, Animator Film Festival Poznan and more. Conny Zenk lives and works in Vienna, completed her Diploma with distinction in Digital Art (Univ. Prof. Virgil Widrich, Univ. Prof. Ruth Schnell) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she is currently in the Ph.D. in Art program. Zenk has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the University of Music and Performing Arts and the University of Music and Theatre Munich.

Honeycomb is the name of a technique used in facade restoration of marble. In Denmark several buildings worthy of preservation are covered with marble from Greenland, extracted during the interwar period (1930s). Among other buildings is Overformynderiet in Copenhagen.  In the work Honeycomb Image/Archive Cladding, visual artists Eva la Cour and Tinne Zenner juxtapose their own film recordings following the renovation of Overformynderiet in Copenhagen (2019) with Jette Bang’s film recordings from the marble mine in Maarmorilik (1938). The soundscape composed by Alexander Holm, utilises field and contact microphone recordings from the exterior and interior location of Overformynderiet (2021).  Through an interplay of image, sound and text, the material facade of Overformynderiet is not simply rendered visible as image. Rather, Honeycomb Image/Archive Cladding speculates on the production of images in general, considered as situated layers of geopolitical relations. Not least historical and colonial relations between Greenland and Denmark.

Tinne Zenner is a visual artist, filmmaker and programmer based in Copenhagen. She holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (2016). Working with analogue film, 3D renderings and spatial installation, her work moves between the cinema and exhibition space while exploring the structures, in which layers of history, politics and collective memory are embedded. In recent years, her work has been actively and critically engaged with the physical and cultural traces of the Danish colonial past and present in Greenland. Her films have been shown at a number of international film festivals including New York Film Festival, CPH:DOX, Courtisane, Oberhausen, EMAF, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Image Forum Tokyo and EXiS, and her installation work exhibited at museums and galleries internationally. Zenner is a member of the film collectives Sharna Pax and Terrassen, both engaging with the social life of film, and works as a programmer for EMAF - European Media Arts Festival. She is currently in production of her upcoming solo-exhibition (Im)material Extraction opening at Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen in November 2023. Eva la Cour is an artist and researcher, interested in temporal and relational forms of the image and image-practices. Drawing inspiration from strategies of montage, while using both analogue film, video, text and display aesthetic elements, her spatial work and performative demonstrations are always effects of lenghty and multifaceted investigative processes. Out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the representational discourse, and its historical and colonial legacy, la Cour has written the book Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-future Essayism - the result of a practice-based artistic PhD project, obtained from HDK-Valand (the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, Gothenburg University, SE). Her individual and collaborative works have been exhibited, screened, and performed internationally, often transgressing spaces of film culture, academic research, and fine art. La Cour holds a MA in Visual and Media Anthropology (Freie Universität Berlin, DE) as well as in Fine Arts (The Jutland Art Academy, DK), and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Art as Forum, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Silence is gold. Who needs words in this sea of selfless love.

Mikhail Zheleznikov was born in Leningrad in 1972. Made TV episodes for ARTE and YLE, films for St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio. Participant and jury member of various international film festivals. His video works have been exhibited at modern art museum Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), Museum of the Moving Image (New York, USA), The National Art Center (Tokyo, Japan), Kunst Museum Bonn (Germany), Museum of Modern Art Erarta (St. Petersburg, Russia). Since 2011 curates experimental short film competition In Silico at Message To Man film festival. In 2012 co-organized experimental film festival Kinodot. In 2015-2019 was teaching at St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture, in 2016-2021 in St. Petersburg New Cinema School. In 2019 was one of the curators of the experimental project Per Forma 2 Stage at the Big Drama Theater. Since 2019 he has taught documentary filmmaking at St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television.

A desert landscape, as if from another planet. A few lonely, rusty shipwrecks. Low desert scrub grows around them to hold the sand together during the merciless storms. Aralkum, the Aral Desert, is the bare seabed, the last thing left of the Aral Sea. By weaving together different cinematic textures, the short film Aralkum re-imagines the dried-up Aral Sea, allowing an old fisherman to set sail one last time.

Mila Zhluktenko (*Kyiv/Ukraine) and Daniel Asadi Faezi (*Schweinfurt/Germany) studied in the documentary department at University of Television and Film Munich. They collaborated on various non-fiction projects, including The Absence of Apricots, Opera Glasses or Aralkum, which screened at festivals such as Locarno, San Sebastian, and Visions du Réel. Their most recent film "waking up in silence" was awarded the International Juryaward at 73. Berlinale Generation Kplus competition.

A husband and wife, both queer, live together but as if in two different worlds. A programme guides them along every day: how to wash up, how to behave, all pointing toward a specific reproductive goal. Between satire and the surreal, "Future Flowers" is reflects the economic and productive imperatives imposed in hetero-directed dreams.

Hao Zhou is a filmmaker from southwest China. An alum of the Cinéfondation Résidence and Berlinale Talents, Zhou has directed an indie feature "The Night", which premiered at the Berlinale Panorama. Zhou's short film "Frozen Out" was a Student Academy Awards gold medal winner and screened at Fribourg, BFI Flare, and many other festivals. Currently Zhou is working on multiple queer narrative and nonfiction projects.

A drifting conversation takes place in the interior of the former residence of the Pope of the Enlightenment in Bologna, Italy. LUMI – Trio was conceived and filmed in bird's-eye long takes combining fictional narration, staged documentary and re-enactment. Although they have different origins -Omar was born in Ghana and raised in Italy, Yakub emigrated from Nigeria, Bianca is Italian- the three friends are coming of age in the same city and their shared desire to explore the world makes them aware of the arbitrary limits imposed by their passports. Their languid talks range from quarantine to desires for escape, from projections about the future to mutual attraction, discovering that some prejudices still separate the group of “us” from “ the others”.

Anna de Manincor | ZimmerFrei Born in Trento (Italy), lived in various cities - for work and for choice - including Bologna, Marseille, Brooklyn, Bari, Brussels and a Greek island of the Dodecanese. Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and Sassari (Sardinia). Since 2000 works within the collective ZimmerFrei, founded with sound designer Massimo Carozzi and artist Anna Rispoli and realized several documentary films, video installations, soundwalks, performances and public art projects. Exploring the boundaries between public space and private territories, ZimmerFrei portrays everyday situations of living and working, seeking for sudden and unstable epiphanies. ZimmerFrei’s recent works are dedicated to urban and rural contexts in transformation, observing temporary communities taking shape, fading away or transforming again. Most of the film works are created on site thanks to residence production grants (Belgium, France, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Italy, Greece and China) or with international co-production (Italy-France-Belgium). Since 2011, the long term working cycles by ZimmerFrei have been produced with European funds, in the frame of InSitu Network (Temporary Cities: 6 documentary films), Open Latitudes (Family Affair, live format with local participants in 8 European cities) and Atlas of Transitions (Saga, doc in 4 episodes).

Nadir takes place at Norra Grängesbergsgatan, a kilometer-long street just outside central Malmö. A place of sometimes conflicting cultural and political interests, which was once considered a “no-go zone” by the municipality, as well as cultural gentrification zone, can perhaps be described as an expressive and symphonic micro-city. Surrounded by several small-scale industries, established in the 1930s, there is a lingering scent from the nearby Pågen bread-factory. Here, a Baptist church gathers upstairs of an old production facility side by side with flowing neon from Arab furniture stores and carpet stores. In Nadir, the narratives surrounding the street are reformulated as “anti-narrative” through a series of sensorial sequences through and on the street.

Amin Zouiten, is a Swedish-Moroccan artist and filmmaker educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Malmö and Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. His works and films have been shown at, among others, Malmö Konsthall, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Konsthall Charlottenborg, CPH:DOX, Tempo Documentary Festival.