Paris Programme
Tuesday 19 November 2024

En Californie, environ 172 000 personnes sont sans abri, soit 30 % du total du pays, même si cet état ne représente que 12 % de la population des États-Unis. Le manque de logements abordables, les problèmes de santé mentale et la consommation de drogues, sont les causes principales de cette crise sociale. Cette détresse humaine est partout de nos jours, mais elle est loin d’être banale. J’ai rencontré quelques personnes itinérantes lors de mon passage dans la ville de El Centro et elles ont bien voulu que je les filme. J’ai capté quelques moments de leur vie quotidienne, aux abords l’autoroute 8 et du désert de Sonora.

Isabelle Hayeur est connue pour ses photographies et ses vidéos expérimentales. Elle a également réalisé plusieurs commandes publiques, des installations in situ et des livres photographiques. Sa démarche s’inscrit dans la perspective d’une critique écologique, urbanistique et sociale. Depuis la fin des années 1990, elle sonde les territoires qu’elle parcourt pour appréhender comment nos civilisations contemporaines investissent et façonnent leurs environnements. Elle est préoccupée par l’évolution des lieux et des communautés dans le contexte sociopolitique néolibéral que nous connaissons actuellement. Ses travaux ont notamment été présentés au Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein et aux Rencontres internationales de la photographie à Arles. Elle a aussi fait plusieurs résidences d'artistes et participé à de nombreux festivals internationaux.

Jishin (Japanese: earthquake) shows an archaic-looking special effect for a Hollywood film of the 1940s: a house begins to sway, stone lanterns fall over, an actor loses his grip. Finally, mountains of debris fill the screen. The drama is repeated in five successive, slightly varied camera perspectives. The uncut raw material allows an analytical view of the clichéd and scenery-like setting: the disaster is not due to a natural event but to a precalculated performance.

born in Langenhagen, Germany, in 1966, studied Visual Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK). Since 1989 he has produced films, videos and video installations, some of them in collaboration with video artist Volker Schreiner (1994 – 2004), and, more frequently, in collaboration with filmmaker Matthias Müller (1999 – 2022). He lives and works in Hanover, Germany.

‘The End’ introduces Todd, an actor who has specialized in playing ill and dying patients in the context of medical practice situations for 30 years. Through documenting the scenography of a simulated hospital, a heart surgery on a plastic torso and Todd in an hotel room repeatedly falling to the floor - playing dead - ‘The End’ reflects on the way we use narratives to navigate reality. Layers of Todd’s voice and fragments from his scripts contribute to the blurring of lines between the fictitious and the actual, while elements of repetition in both speech and image remold ideas of linearity. In this way, ‘The End’ investigates the images, rituals and words associated with the certainty of death. It asks what space and shape it is granted — in the daily as well as on the screen - and how our emotional lives are continually shaped by the images we consume, leading us to turn to the language of fiction in the moments of our lives when we cannot find the words ourselves.

Freja Sofie Kirk (b. 1990) is a visual artist based in Copenhagen. Recent exhibitions includes Simian (DK), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), Inter.pblc (DK), 5533 (TR), Copenhagen Contemporary (DK), Bianca D’Alessandro (DK), Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand (DK), Kunstverein Wiesen (DE). Her films have been screened at CPH:DOX, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival among others.

An ecstatic biopic about the world's most successful living painter. In vivid images, this AI hybrid film sheds light on the social role of painting in the field of tension between creativity, capital investment and spirituality. We are currently in the middle of the transition phase from analog to artificial reproducibility. Gerhard's unique painting techniques, especially squeegeeing, have triggered a worldwide hype. His techniques and ideas are being adapted, refined and improved by global “protagonists” and then flooded the markets (+social media). The myth of the “genius” writes itself into the DNA of an increasingly uncontrollable chain of creation as a fabulous and controversial homage.

Ulu Braun (1976) lives in Berlin and Finland. Between 1996 - 2005 he studied painting and film in Vienna, Helsinki, and Berlin. He has been using the medium of video to explore the field between the visual arts and auteur cinema since 1997 and he is one of the key figures who have transferred painting into video art. His works are regularly shown at film festivals and exhibited in art institutions.

In Memory Architecture, a surveyor travels to the north of Sweden to survey a site for the building of a new data centre. This systematic task of transforming the terrain into a digital model quickly becomes a desperate search for some kind of underlying structure of the surveyor’s surroundings.

Alexander Walmsley (UK, b. 1992) is a filmmaker and photographer. In his research-based practice, he investigates how our understanding of the earth is shifting, mediated by the new technological, environmental and social realities of the 21st century. His recent work has been shown at the Daejeon Biennale of Arts and Sciences, Tirana Art Lab, Sharjah Art Foundation, The Photographers' Gallery, and Athens Digital Art Festival. He was a commissioned artist for the Albanian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale and was shortlisted for the Deloitte Photo Grant in 2023 and Istanbul 212 Photography Prize in 2021. He previously studied Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Geneva (CH), and is currently a lecturer at the Film University Konrad Wolf in Potsdam, Germany, where is also undertaking an artistic PhD on the subject of real-time representations of the planet.

Archipelago (No one is an island) splashes heedlessly into a fictional exploration of the high frequency trading firm Archipelago and its existence in the strange socio-political, socio-economical and psychological reality of the proliferating internet and lives lived in wireless connectivity. In this business realm, human activity, unfolding in virtual spaces and directed by algorithms, is mainly left to perform the rituals that gives the bodiless stream a body; performing the myths of human ingenuity and dominance; repeating the hierarchical patterns that represent human social activity. The dramatic structure of the two channel video work shapes an archipelago in itself. Every character inhabiting the depicted environment forms an island within herself, literally plugged into a closed circuit; AirPods in ear; screen glued to face. Islands that seem to react upon one another even across time particulars and image frames.

Soren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions insisting on new meaning forming in the thin membrane negotiating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder has an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The School of Art and Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of the Arts. He has been artist-in-residence at ISCP in New York, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, SOMA in Mexico City, Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt and Platform Garanti in Istanbul. Previous exhibitions include solo presentations at Turku Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Tranen Contemporary Art Center, Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art and Den Frie - Centre for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He was furthermore represented at the 9th Bucharest Biennale, the 19th Biennale of Sydney, the 1st eva International Biennial of Visual Art, the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Manifesta 8 and the 6th International Liverpool Biennial. He recently finished his PhD in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, titled “Oceanic Horror - or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism”.

Media performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about The Death of the Author, inspired by Barthes' famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.

Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. Her video and performance work have been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, the PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina. www.daynarama.com

This two-channel video draws its inspiration from Carl Jung's ideas of the near-death-experience, and the title refers to his archetype Death Mother. To the left you see a AI generated character dressed as an air stewardess, speaking intensely to the viewers. She has been given the deep voice of the Jungian analyst Joseph Lee. On the right screen we see real drone videos of fault ruptures caused by earthquakes, and hear sounds from inside the crust of the earth. In the vague relations between these two dream spaces - one floating on top of the other - there is a bizarre death fantasy unfolding. The underlying topic of the film can be found in the conflict between the artificial and the analogue, the vulgar and the sublime. The work won the artist BiT Elite price at Stipendutstillingen in 2024, Telemark Kunstsenter, Norway

Tor-Finn Malum Fitje is a video artist, writer and film teacher based in Oslo, Norway. He holds an MFA from the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm, a BFA from Konstfack and a Bachelor in Film Production from Bergen University, specializing in directing. His work includes multi-channel video installations as well as feature length essay films. Malum Fitje has exhibited his films at The National Museum and Gallery of Photography in Oslo and the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm

A group of skaters take refuge in a shopping mall, making it their playground. As they spend time skating the empty hallways the stillness creeps in. It's a dead end.

Mário Macedo is graduated in 2010 in Sound and Image by the Portuguese Catholic University of Porto (UCP). In 2011 finished the film course at the European Film College in Denmark. Two of his short documentaries, ’Tio Rui’ (2011) and ‘Maria Sem Pecado’ (2016), premiered at DocLisboa Festival, having the latter won the National Grand Prix at FEST 2017 and consequentially shown at RTP, the Portuguese public television. Both films were also part of the New Visions of the Portuguese Cinema at the Portuguese Cinematheque in 2017. His first fiction short film ‘Terceiro Turno (Skin River)’ premiered in 2021 at Curtas Vila do Conde IFF in the National Competition and it won the award for Best Director. It also made its international premiere at Cairo Film Festival 2021. Has two new short films to release, 'Cul-de-sac' and 'Takvog Te Volim', co-productions between Croatia and Portugal. Right now, he's developing a new short film together with Dornaz Hajiha, part of Factory and will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2023. Also, he's preparing a feature film in Berlin, 'Purple Milkweed', together with Christian Tranberg, and finishing writing his first solo feature film 'The Robbery'. Will soon release his first photobook 'Running Away Into You' by the publisher Lebop. At the moment, he divides his time between Copenhagen, Zagreb, Berlin and Portugal. Vanja is a Croatian director with a BFA in Film and Television at Savannah College of Art and Design (USA). He directed several short films: Insomniac (2002, Cannes Film Festival/ Director's Fortnight), Wayking (2003), Carver is Dead (2012, Zagreb Film Festival) and Lora Wears Black (2019, Zagreb Film Festival). Vanja is experienced in directing TV commercials for leading brands such as T-Mobile, Vodafone, as well as for international clients such as Sony Asia Pacific. He participated in Berlinale Talent Campus and Sarajevo Talent Campus. He is developing his first feature film, Blok 62 (Ekran+, Connecting Cottbus).

On another day, a group of policemen guard the outskirts of a city. There is no one else on the streets. They wait for an order to go into action. However, that order never comes and a state of confusion and disorientation begins to take hold off them, until they forget what they were doing there.

So far his works have toured several international film festivals and contemporary art spaces such as FICVIÑA, Minsk, Curtocircuito, Riga IFF , Tabakalera Donosti or La Fábrica de Armas in Oviedo. "The Coming Insurrection" was selected as a project in the Focus Script 2022 of the Cannes Film Festival, and was also a beneficiary of one of the Visual Creation Grants of Matadero Madrid, having its international premiere in the Busan International Short Film Festival. Also, he is codirector of "A suburban mythology" (2024, an hybrid film premiered at Documenta Madrid. He is currently editing several projects and developing of his first feature film, "Laguna El Ministro".

The video is an AI assisted meditation on self-help through extreme sonic manipulation, in a semi-erotic plastic dreamscape of watered down and for profit thanatotherapy, where new age imagery devolves into Cronenberg-esque mutations, in complete contrast with the chaotic and unpredictable sonic experiments which may or may not be useful in your personal quest to embetter your True Self™. The music is highly processed, with just a few audible artifacts left of the original code, drum kit and modular based sources, creating sounds that hopefully escape attempts at AI classification.

Matthew Biederman, b. 1972, Chicago Heights, IL, USA. Matthew Biederman works across media and milieus, architectures and systems, communities and continents since 1990. He creates works where light, space and sound reflect on the intricacies of perception. Since 2008 he is a co-founder of Arctic Perspective Initiative, with Marko Peljhan working throughout the circumpolar region. He has served as artist-in-residence at a variety of institutions and institutes, including the Center for Experimental Television on numerous occasions, CMU’s CREATE lab, the Wave Farm, th Finnish Bioarts Society and many more. His work has been featured at: Lyon Bienniale, Istanbul Design Bienniale, The Tokyo Museum of Photography, ELEKTRA, MUTEK, Ars Electronica, Bienniale of Digital Art (CA), Artissima (IT), SCAPE Bienniale (NZ) and the Moscow Biennale (RU), among others. Pierce Warnecke is a multidisciplinary digital artist. His work, on the border between experimental music, digital arts and video art, is influenced by the observation of the effects of time on matter: modification, deterioration and disappearance. He frequently collaborates with prominent figures such as Frank Bretschneider, Matthew Biederman, Yair Elazar Glotman and Keith Fullerton Whitman among others. He has presented his work in the form of performances, concerts and installations at MUTEK, ZKM, CTM, Elektra, KW Institut, La Biennale NEMO, Sonic Acts, Martin Gropius Bau, MAC Montreal, Scopitone, LEV Festival, SXSW, FILE, etc. Between 2017 and 2019 he composed several audiovisual pieces for the Institute for Sound and Music’s Hexadome project in Berlin, San Francisco, Montreal and more. His music has been published on raster-media (DE) and Room40 (AU), and he is represented by DISK Agency in Berlin.

Blinded by Centuries navigates the evolution of consciousness in a speculative ??post-human landscape. A generation adrift, existing between earthly and mythical realms, traces history to imagine a future before transformation. Inspired by short-format contemporary music videos, it is an auto-fictional retelling of the Buddhist folktale rooted in Southeast Asia called “Phra Ros Meri” (‘Twelve Sisters.’)

Parinda Mai, like many of her generation in Thailand, grew up with the story Twelve Sisters, communicated across platforms, from oral history to soap operas and cartoon animations. The project 12 Kalpas Tales is the artist’s personal search and reinterpretation of the moral of this story and its implications for the interconnected humanity. Blinded by Centuries emerges from this project, and is intended to capture the core energy of this myth that involves invading, exploiting, and destroying something, then leaving it behind to later try to rescue it with one’s ethics. In Blinded by Centuries an esoteric folktale is played out globally in contemporary terms. Project website: https://the12kalpastale.online/

Like many people in their later years, my grandfather had a set of oft-repeated stories. Towards the last few months of his life, a brand new person,'Chetan' started populating his life. This poem-film is an attempt to understand the feeling.

Adheep Das likes mixing various mediums and finding out what comes of them. Fascinated by science and arts alike, his interests take him to places that merge the two. As part of a 3 person collective, he got the ThinkArts Grant for Children in 2022. 'Moonless', a film he directed and animated, has competed at DokLeipzig and Dharamshala Intl. Film Festival, amongst others. His documentary 'Khaalti Kaay Varti Kaay' competed at IDSSFK, Kerala. Some of his work has also been exhibited as part of the Kochi-Muziris Students' Biennale and the Wrong Biennale. He has worked on a live shadow puppetry production called ‘Zig Zags to Earth’, and has performed at venues such as Max Muller Bhawan, Delhi, and Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts, Delhi. He has also been part of the Serendipity Arts Foundation Residency 2024.

La nuit tombée, la ville n’existe plus que par halos. Vigile ou gardien, il faut alors veiller parmi les ombres, confondre la fatigue et le sommeil, nuit après nuit, scruter l’obscurité quitte à y ouvrir une brèche et réveiller l’invisible.

Pierre Lefrançois Vérove est né en 1989 et vit à Montreuil. Il a étudié aux beaux-arts de Paris-Cergy avant d’intégrer le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains en 2021. Ses travaux, films et textes s’attachent aux marges visibles ou invisibles et à celles et ceux qui les peuplent. Une considération qui l’a mené à entrer dans le champ de la psychothérapie institutionnelle (La chambre de Paul, 2022) ou encore à tirer le fil des frontières européennes entre Paris et l’île de Lesbos en Grèce (Algèbre, 2019)

A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. In mathematics, the word discrete is used to describe objects that are not continuous and separated from each other. Discrete mathematics is applied in a number of different areas such as encryption, databases, game theory, graph theory and algorithms.

Lucia Pagano and Vanja Sandell Billström were educated at the Lodz Film School and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Discrete Mathematics is their second film as a duo which further explores methods developed in their previous film Park. Park was nominated to the Best Swedish Short at Göteborg Film Festival 2020, Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film Award, and winner of the Tempo Sound Award the same year. Previously they have shown their work at festivals and art venues around the world.

Parallel (work in progress demo) tells the story of the fissure–the modes of blindness and longing, of not seeing and being unseen, of being together yet also apart–at the heart of an intimate exchange. The installation is constructed of an elongated strip of portraits which can be viewed from both front and back. On either side of the installation are displayed close-up faces of a range of individuals. Each of the individuals stares at a parallel figure sitting across from them, their back to the camera. The parallel figure’s face is visible from the reverse side of the installation, as is the back of the person we saw on the front side. Beyond the more immediate scene of the gaze exchange between the figures, we can see, through cracks in the wall behind them, a hint of an open landscape. At an almost undetectable speed, the two rows of portraits–those who are facing us and those who are not–drift along, and then off of the edge of the screen. New pairs continue to slip in endlessly. The pace of the rows’ drift (front and back), however, is slightly mismatched. This gap in the rate of their movement results in a subtle dissonance: the parallel figures slip away from each other as well as away from us. As they drift, they intermittently obscure the individuals they face. Short texts–segments of online messages written to an unknown other–are, at irregular intervals, read out loud by one of the visible characters. The same text might be performed by different people. Several distinct texts might be read by a few characters at once. The link between who we see and the story we associate with them is, thus, like their image, unsettled, interrupted and displaced. The video attached is a work in progress edit demonstrating two possible scales for the project's display.

An experimental documentary maker for over twenty years, Even has produced work which ranges from feature-length documentaries to multi-channel installation and interactive video work, and which, relying on almost imperceptible digital manipulation of slow and extended moments, aims to depict the less overt manifestations of complex, and at times extreme, social/political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, Spain, the U.S. and Germany, among others). Even’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada and Europe, including Doc Fortnight at MoMA, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, RIDM Film Festival, Montreal, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts and Next Level Awards, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Award, Media Arts Award, the Jerome Foundation, Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and the Jewish Museum (NY) among others. Even has been an invited guest at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, Open Doc Lab at MIT, SXSW Interactive Conference, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia and others. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France and Video Data Bank (VDB). Even is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.

Tracing a space between real and phantasmatic ecological dread, Terminal Island presents a multi-sensory portrait of a landscape in peril, an ambivalent lament for LA’s vanishing palms and a sermon on Doomsday infrastructure delivered to no one.

Sam Drake (USA) is a filmmaker based in Milwaukee, WI. Working with 16mm film and found media, her work embraces collage as a framework for interrogating contemporary life and landscapes. She received a BFA in Film from Wright State University, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Cinema Arts. Her work has been exhibited at film festivals and venues including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Doc Fortnight (MoMA), Media City Film Festival, ExiS, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, CROSSROADS, Non-Syntax Experimental Image, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, and Antimatter. She is currently a lecturer in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

NON HUMAN is a film made from poems written in collaboration with an Artificial Intelligence (recurrent neural network) and five artists — York Chang, Marcus Civin, Tia-Simone Gardner, Viet Le, and Yvonne Rainer. Inspired by poet Muriel Rukeyser’s technique for writing The Book of the Dead (1937), a poem in which she directly quotes workers’ voices from congressional testimony about the Hawk’s Nest mining catastrophe that killed nearly 2000 miners, 80% of whom were Black workers. NON HUMAN was filmed in rural Vermont in disused marble, quarries, hospitals, and local artists’ studios and it presents leisure time and creative space as conditions to excavate the unwritten histories of labor, racism, and environmental destruction in local American communities. The generative AI used to write the script was trained with Rukeyser’s Collected Poems, the congressional testimony of workers that she quoted, and contemporary critical race and eco-feminist theories of Kathryn Yussof, Tavia Nyong’o, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers. In Hartman’s essay The Dead Book Revisited she asks “how do we attend to black death? How do we find life where only the traces of destruction remain?” NON HUMAN’s critical AI writing machine, fed by historic documentary materials, poetry that witnesses to extractive capitalism and anti-black racism, speculates on Hartman’s question. Live performers in NON HUMAN include: sound engineer Ben Arindell, singer/song-writer Patrick Sargent, physician Jeffrey Yucht, critic Marcus Civin, sculptor Fred X Brownstein, and sound technician Jack Schlandt.

David Kelley is an artist working in photography, video, and installation. His recent projects explore the impacts of global capitalism, resource extraction, and evolving landscapes, combining elements of experimental documentary, ethnography, and avant-garde cinema to offer a perspective that is both grounded and speculative. His work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Fotofest Biennial in Houston, Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, The Bank in Shanghai, and the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Kelley holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and was a resident of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is based in Los Angeles, where he is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California.

Combining low resolution footage, 16mm film and satellite imagery, Efforts of Nature considers the passage of time, processes of change and dissolution from two distant perspectives: the existential level of the body and the planetary level of shifting geological conditions.

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. His practice remains open and responsive to contemporary experience and so largely eschews the rehearsal of set themes. However, interests in the human condition, the cultic milieu, counterculture, ethnography, Afro-Caribbean, East Asian and British histories, and the built environment are all mainstays. He is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. He was the 2023 IFFR Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards; the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg; in 2021, the Best Documentary Short Film Award at Tacoma Film Festival, USA; the Explora Award at Curtocircuito International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela; the UK Short Film Award at Open City Documentary Film Festival, London, the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Director at Punto de Vista, Spain, and the Best Experimental Film Award at Curtas Vila do Conde, Portugal; in 2020, the New Vision Award at CPH:DOX, Denmark and the Best Experimental Film award at Curtas Vila Do Conde, Portugal . Over the past fourteen years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape and influence the UK’s new landscape of progressive cultural discourse and debate. A key reference here is his 2017 text The New Conservatism: Complicity and the UK Art World’s Performance of Progression, available here. From 2012 – 2023 he was the producer and presenter of Studio Visit, an interview-based, broadcast radio programme for London’s Resonance 104.4FM. The post-broadcast archive of over 100 interviews can be found here, and includes in depth conversations with Carolee Schneemann, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jimmie Durham, Susan Hiller, Jean Fisher, Andrea Fraser, Kathleen Daniel and Billy Woodberry.

Anna Baranowski and Vlad Br?teanu’s collaborative piece invites the audience to experience an intimate hypnotic induction. By making use of the hypnotic methodologies of relaxation - the sound of the sea and the soft human voice; images from the seaside, and the notions of rest and recovery that vacation recalls - the artist’s voices smoothly induce into the visitors’s consciousness local stories and realities of global warming, massive migration and economic challenges inflicted by global politics and mass tourism from Radhima, Vlora, a small village at the tip of the Albanian Riviera.

Anna Baranowski was born in Bytom, Poland in 1983. Today she lives secluded in a small village surrounded by the forests of East Germany and works on her art. In 2012, she received her diploma in media art with distinction from the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. After her studies, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad, such as the Berlin Biennale „Forget Fear“ in 2012. She has received grants, such as the Stiftung Kunstfonds working scholarship in 2018, and in recent years has been invited to various artist residencies, such as the Greater Columbus Arts Council in Columbus, USA, to develop new artistic works. Anna Baranowski looks at historical legacies in contemporary everyday life and reflects on collective psychological phenomena of human behaviour. In the field of experimental and documentary film, she focuses on direct cinema. She always uses documentary material in her works. In addition to her own cinematic images, composed in detail, the use of archival material is a central element of her experimental films. In doing so, she uses a wide variety of sources, such as amateur recordings, NASA or military footage. By taking them out of their original context, her works release new meanings. With documentary images that depict the real world, Anna Baranowski tells fictitious stories that are irritating and contrary to obvious expectations, which is precisely why they have an inner meaning and for this very reason trigger processes - the viewer is thrown back on himself and is confronted with his own feelings. Vlad Br?teanu, born in Bac?u, in the former Socialist Republic of Romania (RSR) in 1986, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Br?teanu holds a M.A. in Photography and Moving Image and a B.A. in Graphics from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. In 2016 he studied Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. His background in graphics forms the base for theoretical and conceptual considerations in which photography functions as a primary medium. Sound/hypnotic inductions, found objects, and public interventions that use playful semiotics of imagery are found in his current practice. Navigating the boundaries between public and private spaces, and finding signifiers for (in)visibility are translated into works that raise questions on precarity, fragility and stability in neoliberal societies. Research into the concept of plasticity and the effects of language are central in his artistic practice. Vlad is the co-founder of Template, an artist initiative and exhibition project that started in Bucharest in 2018 and is an alumnus of WHW Akademija in Zagreb in 2020.

The seemingly extraterrestrial camera eye floats upside down through a palm grove planted in a strictly rectilinear manner. Nature is literally upside down and existing in an artificial order as a business game. Only at the crescendo of the strange, vibrantly smoldering soundtrack by Jung an Tagen does the gaze slowly turn clockwise. Then, cut: quietness, open space. At some point the logo “Valley Pride” can be read in the middle of the California desert, on oversized corrugated iron sheets, designating one of the most important commercial areas of US industrial agriculture. It’s an inhospitable place, whose increasingly bizarre unnaturalness is conveyed through Lukas Marxt’s unmistakable approach. Visually stunning, the monocultural agrarian symmetry and its ballet of irrigation testify to man’s self-extinction in the service of constant profit orientation – even if the necessarily anonymous workers return to the picture in this, Marxt’s fourth visual examination of the Imperial Valley. Under the sword of Damocles of unclear residence status and a US immigration policy that ranges from rigid to ignorant, the personal destinies and stories behind them must remain untold. The people are the smallest cog in the wheel of work in the gigantic agricultural machine trimmed for optimization, as it buries ecological and ethical standards under the relentless shoveling and plowing equipment. In front of endless rock formations and dancing mirages caused by the heat, they fertilize, harvest, and pack lettuce in a quasi-automated routine. In near-astonishment, the camera eye observes this hustle and bustle as it occurs in a leafy place where no greenery was intended. This is a place where fertility and death collide mercilessly and the threatening catastrophe – social, economic, ecological – is inscribed in every image, no matter how innocent. Here, beauty meets decay and exploitation as a man-made dystopia. That, too, is Valley Pride – a pride with an expiration date. (Sebastian Höglinger)

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.

While the shade of a tree is being stolen away, bodiless organs sit in the enormous gaps of the drained earth. Under the constant noise of unseen machines, disjointed body parts touch the drying soil and breaths are only audible to insects. In this quiet, distorted world, old songs of goodwill are sung: “Future times of vain sorrow do not disturb our gentle sleep...” While we are waiting for the miracle to come the sand continues to fly.

SENEM GÖKCE OGULTEKIN work spans the disciplines of choreography, performance, vocal work and film. In 2019, "Dun/Home" was chosen for Artist´s Film International, an international event initiated by Whitechapel Gallery in London and was shown at various museums and galleries of the world. In 2020, Senem Gökce Ogultekin was awarded the Allbau Foundation Culture Prize and was appointed to the Young College by the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2021. LEVENT DURAN is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. They studied sociology at Istanbul University and film at the Fine Arts University of Hamburg, where they obtained their master's degree. Their writings have been published in major magazines and newspapers in Turkey, and their visual creations (video, painting, sculpture, installation) have been exhibited internationally. Their film project "Murmuring Draft Dodgers" received the Courageous Citizen Award from the European Cultural Foundation.

A speculative and poetic exploration of the entanglements and overlaps of historical events in the Atacama Desert (Chile), the film, told from the perspective of the wind, takes us on a visual journey, floating freely through the many sites and histories of the Atacama. Exploring some of the largest lithium mines in the world; hovering above the remnants of colonial labour camps reactivated under the Pinochet regime, and slipping inside the international observatory of the ALMA large array facility; Ferreira da Silva and Neuman’s camera uncovers material trajectories whose planetary scope and historical depths remain invisible to the many. By pointing at how these trajectories mutated and expanded into aspects of modern geopolitical issues, Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims, exposes pillars of western thought that sustain colonial legacies of inequality, racial exclusion and human extractivism while simultaneously proposing another worldview, one that is carried and echoed by the wind.

Arjuna Neuman is an artist, filmmaker, and writer and he is the co-founder of archiveofbelonging.org – a resource database for migrants and refugees. Neuman works with the essay as a guiding, multi-perspectival and inherently future-oriented form that underpins his experimental research and creative approach. As a writer he has published essays in Relief Press, The Journal for New Writing, VIA Magazine, Concord, Art Voices, Flaunt, LEAP, Hearings Journal, and e- flux. He studied at California Institute of the Arts. Denise Ferreira da Silva is an artist and philosopher. She currently is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, at NYU. Her artistic and academic work reflect and speculate on questions crucial to contemporary philosophy, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), Unpayable Debt (2022) amongst many other titles. Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s collaboration includes the film Serpent Rain (2016), 4 Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum (2020), Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims (2023). Their films have been exhibited at major art venues such as MACBA (Barcelona); Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London), The 56th Venice Biennale, The Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (Berlin), Centre for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), and more. In Februrary 2024, they opened a retrospective of their work at the Munch Museum in Oslo; in May 2024 the Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp opened a solo exhibition of their work. They have a forthcoming monograph published by Archive Books.