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The animation is about the transformation of lines into shapes and objects then to figures and finally into a flight through space.

Ozan Adam was born in 1976 in Ankara, Turkey. He studied art and cinema in New York, worked in film production, advertising, commercials, media, stage construction and design industries. His body of diverse artwork, which consists of text, design, illustration, painting, sculpture, animation, film, video and installation, has been exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions around the world. He has taught film, video production and experimental cinema courses at İstanbul Bilgi University and supervised workshops at Bilkent University, Middle Eastern Technical University, Netherlands Institute for Higher Education and Boğaziçi University. He is currently working at Bahcesehir University teaching production, documentary and video art courses. His film ?Zymotic-Amaurosis? was awarded with the Special Jury Award in the 14th International Ankara Film Festival and another film of his titled ?The Two Names of A Testimony About The Execution of A Happening and A Suitcase Full of Broken Records? was awarded as the Best Experimental Film in the 17th International Ankara Film Festival. Many of his films have been selected and screened by international festivals, galleries and museums.

Zymotic-Amaurosis: Contagious Arbitrary Blindness is a disease caused by a virus, which can capture and store visual information and memories. The film is about a fantastic journey through the book that tells the fragmented story of the remembrances, visions and dreams of a blind man who is subjected to experiments to reveal the visual data that was recorded by the micro-cameras, which were installed in the eyes of an astronaut for a secret mission. After transplanting the eyes of the astronaut to the blind man, they expect to retrieve the recordings through the dreams of the blind man but they get lost in the surreal absurdity of a complex subconscious.

Ozan Adam was born in 1976 in Ankara, Turkey. He studied art and cinema in New York, worked in film production, advertising, commercials, media, stage construction and design industries. His body of diverse artwork, which consists of text, design, illustration, painting, sculpture, animation, film, video and installation, has been exhibited in solo and collective exhibitions around the world. He has been teaching film, video production and experimental cinema courses at İstanbul Bilgi University and Bahcesehir University, supervised workshops at Bilkent University, Middle Eastern Technical University, Netherlands Institute for Higher Education and Boğaziçi University. Many of his films have been selected and screened by international festivals, galleries and museums.

RE: is an ironic piece based on my correspondence with popular international directors and filmmakers. It is a frustrating, perverse and unsuccessful search for ideas connected with an inscrutable film project and classic Hollywood scenes - a piece about artist`s condition and acting desires with intentionally unprofessionally made scenes.

I studied History of Art in Krakow and Acting in London. I participated in various theater/performance worksessions (i.a. with Robert Wilson, Eugenio Barba, Franko B and Ron Athey) and exhibitions in Germany, Greece, Unites States, Mexico, Austria and Russia. Since 2009 I run a private contemporary art space `Florianska22` in Krakow.

Quelque part en Banlieue, dans un futur proche. La classe ouvrière n'existe plus. Vénus se rapproche de la terre. Un homme et son fils refont le monde.

Soufiane Adel est né en 1981 en Algérie et arrive en France à 8 ans. C`est en faisant une école de design, l'ENSCI - Les Ateliers, qu'il découvre le cinéma. En 2004, il décide de filmer son père : ce sera son premier court métrage, "Nuits closes", qui débutera au festival de Clermont-Ferrand. En 2007, il réalise "Kamel s`est suicidé six fois, son père est mort" qui a été sélectionné à la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs et à l'ACID à Cannes en 2008, ainsi que dans de nombreux festivals de par le monde. En 2009, il coréalise avec Angela Terrail, "Sur la tête de Bertha Boxcar", prix du jury au festival Silhouette (montré également à Clermont, Pantin, Ciné-banlieue, Indielisboa ...) et diffusé sur Arte. En 2013, il réalise son second documentaire "Go Forth" qui aborde l`histoire de sa grand-mère algérienne, projetés dans des dizaines de festivals internationaux (Cinéma du réel, Rencontres Internationales Paris-Berlin, Lussas, Montréal...). Son exploration de formes fictionnelles d`auto-filmage se poursuit avec "Vincent V" et "Les bonnes". En 2017, il met de nouveau en scène son père dans une fiction, "La Faim", puis dans l'essai "La lumière tombe", en 2018.

Un soir dans la semaine, mon grand-père Tahar décède en soins palliatifs. Zouina, sa belle-fille est là. Aziz, son fils est là. Fayçal est là. Je suis là. Dieu n?est pas là ? Kamel arrive trop tard.

Diplômé de l?École Nationale Supérieure de Création industrielle de Paris, Soufiane Adel réalise des scénographies pour différentes manifestations culturelles (Les Rencontres de la Photographie d?Arles, le centre culturel Telemar à Rio de Janeiro...). Il signe parallèlement des courts métrages documentaires et de fiction qui sont montrés dans de nombreux festivals. En 2007, il est chef opérateur son d?un documentaire d?Angela Terrail.

Un homme d’origine prolétaire, revient chez ses parents et son frère après une rupture amoureuse avec une femme d’un rang social plus élevé que le sien.

Soufiane Adel est né en 1981 en Algérie et arrive en France à 8 ans. C'est en faisant une école de design, l'ENSCI - Les Ateliers, qu'il découvre le cinéma. En 2004, il décide de filmer son père : ce sera son premier court métrage, "Nuits closes", qui débutera au festival de Clermont-Ferrand. En 2007, il réalise "Kamel s'est suicidé six fois, son père est mort" qui a été sélectionné à la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs et à l'ACID à Cannes en 2008, ainsi que dans de nombreux festivals de par le monde. En 2009, il coréalise avec Angela Terrail, « Sur la tête de Bertha Boxcar », prix du jury au festival Silhouette (montré également à Clermont, Pantin, Ciné-banlieue, Indielisboa ...) et diffusé sur Arte. En 2013, il réalise son second documentaire "Go Forth" qui aborde l'histoire de sa grand-mère algérienne, projetés dans des dizaines de festivals internationaux (Cinéma du réel, Rencontres Paris-Berlin, Lussas, Montréal...). Son exploration de formes fictionnelles d'auto-filmage se poursuit avec « Vincent V » et « Les bonnes ». En 2017, il met de nouveau en scène son père dans une fiction, "La Faim", puis dans l’essai "La lumière tombe".

23heures. Soufiane, Fayçal et leur mère Zouina, roulent de bistrot en bistrot? Ils cherchent quelqu`un dans les rues de Champigny.

1981 :Naissance en Algèrie le 22 septembre 1990 : Arrivé en France en aout à l`age de 8 ans 2001: Obtention d`un baccalauréat Arts Apliquées à Vitry-sur-Seine (94) 2001:Entrée à l`Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle ( ENSCI, Les Ateliers) (75) pour 5ans d`étude

Synopsis : La sonde Voyager s’apprête à quitter notre système solaire. Au même moment, sur Terre, Alain Diaw commence son premier jour de travail dans une grande entreprise automobile. Il revient de loin, et vise lui aussi l’inconnu.

Soufiane Adel est né en 1981 en Algérie et arrive en France à 8 ans. C'est en faisant une école de design, l'ENSCI - Les Ateliers, qu'il découvre le cinéma. En 2004, il décide de filmer son père : ce sera son premier court métrage, NUITS CLOSES, qui débutera au festival de Clermont-Ferrand. En 2007, il réalise KAMEL S’EST SUICIDÉ SIX FOIS, SON PÈRE EST MORT, sélectionné à la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs et à l'ACID à Cannes en 2008. En 2009, il coréalise avec Angela Terrail, SUR LA TÊTE DE BERTHA BOXCAR, prix du jury au festival Silhouette, montré mondialement et diffusé sur Arte. En 2013, il réalise son second documentaire GO FORTH, qui aborde l'histoire de sa grand-mère algérienne, projetés dans des dizaines de festivals internationaux. Son exploration de formes fictionnelles d'auto-filmage se poursuit avec VINCENT V » et LES BONNES. En 2017, il met de nouveau en scène son père dans une fiction, LA FAIM, puis dans l’essai LA LUMIÈRE TOMBE. Son dernier court-métrage LE JOUR OÙ J’ÉTAIS PERDU, interprété par Souleymane Sylla et Damien Bonnard, débute en compétition au IFFR Rotterdam et au Festival international du court-métrage de Clermont-Ferrand.

The Palace was once a grandiose hotel built by the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1929. Long abandoned, the building has recently been bought by Waldorf Astoria and entirely gutted so as to preserve only its historical façade. "Palace, 2013" is a collaboration with the workers on the construction site of Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem and presents a series of three atmospheric tableaux inspired by the formal qualities of the site and its history. By means of simple props and actions, the order of the site and its daily labour routine are temporarily disrupted, allowing for a multiplicity of resonances to occur. Adler de Oliveira thus acts as an observer of the broad range of possibilities embedded within the site: its current reality as a dismantled building on the one hand; and its latent future on the other. The hotel in its present form - a site in the making - presents an anomalous reality, since it functions as a temporary home for its construction workers. The site imbues the power relationships characteristic of Israeli society, contrasted against its designed purpose: to offer its visitors an escape from local reality; a total disconnection from time and place.

Samantha Adler de Oliveira was born in Paris in 1985 and grew up in Brussels. In 2003 she completed a BA in European Studies at King`s College London. She then went on to earn a Fine Art degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, during which time she spent a semester at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2011 she participated in the European Exchange Academy and is a recent graduate of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She received a special mention at the Mediatine Award for emerging artists in Belgium (2011) and the Aileen Cooper Prize for outstanding graduate show (2012). Her work has been shown in Israel, Belgium, Germany and New York. She had her first one-person exhibition in 2013 at the Architect House in Tel-Aviv Yaffo.

Rokko and Bobbi visits world-famous psychoanalyst Molly for the first time. The dog couple reveal problems with PTSD and childhood trauma, manifested as symptomatic carpet wetting and an amputated sex life. But through the teachings of Goethe’s color theory, Molly brings the couple on a hypnotic, and transformative love journey.

Copenhagen-based visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and electronic music composer Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl was born in the Danish village Skælskør. He has created a wide range of critically acclaimed artworks that blends genres and media in order to create intricate, bizarre, and sometimes humourous works which resolve around dissolving memory, trauma, and eco-gothic fantasies. Mejdahl holds a master’s degree from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Within few years, Mejdahl has created a wide range of exhibitions at art institutions, and his film works have reached international audiences with screenings in Europe and Asia. Working cross-disciplinary, Mejdahls project often combine different fields of art. His recent solo exhibition 'One! More! Time!" at Kunsthal Rønnebæksholm in Denmark centered around a surprising collaboration with the Danish amusement park BonBon-Land. In 2018, Mejdahl received the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition’s Solo Award for his film 'Ode' — an experimental documentary dealing with the killing of the artist’s abusive father. The film was later acquired by The National Gallery of Denmark.

Re-worked footage from an unfinished film by Senegalese director Mamadou Johnny Sekka forms a re-examination of The Jackson 5’s 1974 trip to Dakar.

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and educator. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu’s work explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism, queerness, and African identities interact in African, white American, and black American cultural spaces. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,”, her work has been screened extensively at festivals and museums nationally and internationally and are available on streaming platforms including PBS, The Criterion Channel and MUBI. In 2013 her short film KWAKU ANANSE was well-received at the Berlinale Shorts and won the 2013 Africa Movie Academy Award. Her short film RELUCTANTLY QUEER was nominated for the Golden Bear and Teddy Award at the 2016 Berlinale Shorts. Owusu has received numerous fellowships and grants including the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists (2020). She has been invited to the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani. She currently lectures at Harvard University.

In a car workshop type space, between the pristine surfaces of car parts, archetypes of mass production, a construction of power is unfolding between a Dobermann Pinscher and its owner. A Dobermann is a special breed, it’s gracious, loyal, and potentially aggressive to strangers. It needs severe training. Both the owner’s and the dog’s consciousness are formed within this relationship. By the obedient appearance of the dog, it seems to concede to the rules it’s been given. But by knowing the rules it starts to gain power itself. The impression the video gives moves between floating through an abattoir where fresh slaughtered livestock is vertically stored and moved around in this almost perfectly hidden horror of death, and a peek into a shop window, where commodities are on display, waiting for a buyer in their best possible appearance. Starting from Wilfrid Sellars theory on the self: If the abattoir represents our scientific self; our matter, our genetic material, our flesh and bones without moral or ethics. In the image of the shop window our manifest self is reflected, a self constructed in a social context, a world of abstractions, of language and reasoning.

Jan Adriaans graduated from the Dutch Art Institute in 2015. His video-works explore human selfhood in its evolutionary context. By drawing a parallel with the animal, the set of constraints we are subjected to become more apparent. If we take these constraints into account, how can we redefine human agency, will, and control? “Selfhood is tyrannical precisely insofar as it is merely a congerie of drives. The act supplants the tyranny of the impulsive self with the rule of the subject. But it is the act itself that is subject. It is no-one’s.” Ray Brassier

As the leader makes a speech, the skies rain...

With his feature film Ezra, Newton I Aduaka won the Etalon d’or de Yennenga at the 20th edition of FESPACO. Premiering in competition at the Sundance film festival, it was nominated for the Humanitas Prize, screened at the Critics’ Week in Cannes and was awarded the United Nation’s prize for Peace and Tolerance, the FIPRESI award and various other awards, including 6 grand jury prizes. Prior to that his multi-award winning indie film debut feature, Rage, was released nation-wide in the UK to critical acclaim and was a recipient of the Carlton television multicultural award, FESPACO’s Oumorou Ganda award, PAFF best first feature award and the OCIC prize. A Ford Foundation grantee, Newton was Filmmaker in Residence at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinéfondation’s La Résidence du Festival and writer in residence at The Moulin d’Ande. Commissioned by the Society of French Directors (SRF) and Cannes’ Quinzaine des Réalisateurs he made a short film on the theme, “Cinema and Globalization”. The result was Funeral. His short films, have screened, in various official competitions and won awards at numerous film festivals such as the Mostra de Venise, Oberhausen film festival, Claremont Ferrand Intl. film festival, Uppsala Intl. short film festival Edinburgh International Film Festival... The NGO, Global Dialogue, commissioned Aduaka to direct four short films on AIDS awareness. These films have been translated into numerous African and European languages and are effectively used as educational tools across the world. Aduaka was a member of the London based Activist film collective Migrant Media. Aduaka was invited to speak at TED, “Africa: The Next Chapter”, held in Arusha, Tanzania. His speech is available online at www.ted.com. He was invited by the Berlin film festival as an expert, to speak on drama and aesthetics of Cinema at the Berlinale Talent Campus. At the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, Aduaka was invited to hold a Master class. One Man’s Show, his third feature premiered at Fespaco, winning the Critics’ Prize. The film had its US premier at the Mill Valley Film Festival. In the past few years Aduaka has made forays into experimental cinema and visual art installation pieces, a return to his days as a member of the radical avant-garde cinema in the early 90s at the London Film-Coop. Aduaka studied Film at the London Film School. He is a published short story writer. The British newspaper, The Independent, named Aduaka as one of the 50 greatest cultural figures shaping the African continent. Aduaka lives in Paris.

Tenir des albums a été une activité très importante dans mon métier de cinéaste au cours des dix dernières années. Ces livres sont composés de photographies, d'images trouvées et photocopiées, de fragments rédigés, de citations, de lettres, de listes et de mes propres récits de fiction. "Secondhand daylight" est la première vidéo d'une série qui utilise mes albums comme point de départ d'un travail d'images mouvantes. La vidéo elle-même devient une sorte d'album au fur et à mesure que j'entrelace les métrages collectionnés au fil des années avec des images provenant des livres. "Secondhand daylight" est un récit expérimental qui explore les lieux, la mémoire et l'obsession.

Simon est né à Belfast, en Irlande du Nord, en 1972 et habite désormais à Londres. Il a étudié le cinéma au Gwent College of Higher Education au Pays de Galles de 1991 à 1993 et a ensuite obtenu un Bachelor of Fine Arts à l'University of Wales Institute à Cardiff, qu'il a fréquenté entre 1995 et 1997. Depuis qu'il est diplômé, il a surtout travaillé dans l'univers de la vidéo digitale, et ses travaux ont été présentés lors de festivals et d'événements artistiques au Royaume-Uni et à l'étranger. Récemment, son travail s'est orienté vers le genre documentaire et a été présenté par des chaînes britanniques telles que ITV, FIVE et Current TV. Il travaille également à temps partiel en tant que conférencier sur les Médias Interactifs au Bernie Grant Arts Centre et enseigne au Documentary Filmmakers Group sur leurs cours en Pologne, au Maroc et à Londres.

Le travail de Marie Aerts questionne les notions de pouvoir et d?organisation sociale qui régissent les sociétés humaines. Traversée par des héritages philosophiques, tel le concept du Corps Sans Organes de Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari, ses recherches débutent notamment par la création d`un personnage iconoclaste : l`Homme sans tête. Inspiré par l?atmosphère des quartiers d?affaires de la City à Londres, la figure de l?Homme sans tête est la représentation d?un être humain générique. Sans passé ni avenir, ce corps apparaît vide de désir, d?ambition, d?amour? Présent dans de nombreuses ?uvres, ce personnage reflète les interrogations et les problématiques de l?individu et d?une communauté face à l?opacité des pouvoirs qui cimente le corps social. La vidéo Grâce aborde la thématique de la migration. Il s?agit pour l?artiste de rendre hommage à ces êtres humains, en quête d?une vie meilleure, qui traversent au péril de leur vie des frontières surveillées et protégées. Alors que la circulation des marchandises relève de l?évidence, cette bénédiction n?est pas accordée à toute l?humanité. Grâce, comme une demande de faveur pour ces conquérants ignorés qui s?efforcent, pour ne pas perdre leur dignité, de gagner leur liberté. Marie Aerts et Marianne Feder

Marie Aerts (1984), vit et travaille à Paris. Le travail de Marie Aerts questionne les notions de pouvoir et d?organisation sociale qui régissent les sociétés humaines. La jeune artiste française interroge les méthodes de légitimations d?un pouvoir, ou d?une forme de domination et les rapports que celles-ci entretiennent avec la croyance. Elle explore les interstices d?un pouvoir, là où les symboles s?installent et déploient leur capacité de fascination. À travers diverses stratégies d`altération, Marie Aerts s`attaque à ces concentrés de représentations, à l`aide d?opérations de soustraction et de transformation qui lui sont chères. En 2013, elle a été présentée dans les expositions collectives, Aqua Vitalis, commissariat Claire Tangy et Paul Ardenne de l?Artothèque de Caen et Égarements, commissariat Agnès Barruol et Véronique Baton au Château d?Avignon (Arles). La galerie Dix9 lui consacre une deuxième exposition personnelle jusqu?au 22 février 2014. Elle prépare plusieurs expositions, dont une résidence dans l?espace projet de l?Artothèque de Caen prévue en 2015.

Engravings in the genre of "World Upside Down", known since the 16th century, depict such scenes as a pig gutting the butcher, a child punishing his teacher, a man carrying a donkey on his back, man and woman exchanging roles and dress, and a beggar in rags magnanimously bestowing alms on a rich man. These engravings contain demons, chimeras, fish flying through the sky and death itself, variously with a scythe or in the mask of a plague doctor. The title of the work, Inverso – both an Italian "reverse, the opposite" and the Old Italian "poetry," and Mundus – the Latin "world," hints at a reinterpretation of reality, a poetic vision. In our interpretation, the absurdist scenes from the medieval carnival appear as episodes of contemporary life in a multichannel video installation. Characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and exchange masks, morphing from beggars to rich men, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street-cleaners are showering the city with refuse. Female inquisitors torture men on IKEA-style structures. Children and seniors are fighting in a kickboxing match. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city. The Trilogy was shown in the Museum of Fine Arts in La Chaux-De-Fonds, Switzerland (June’September 2014). Most recently all three videos were shown at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (June-September 2015). In 2015 AES+F presented the new project Inverso Mundus at 56th Biennale di Venezia. AES+F received Sergey Kuryokhin Award 2011, the main award of the Kandinsky Prize 2012, the main award of the NordArt Festival 2014, and Pino Pascali Prize 2015 (18th Edition) ‘ all for the project Allegoria Sacra. AES+F were awarded Bronze Medal (2005) and Golden Medal (2013) of Russian National Academy of Fine Arts. AES Group was originally formed in 1987 by the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich and the multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky. Exhibiting abroad from 1989, the group expanded its personnel and name with the addition of the photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1995. AES+F’s recent work has developed at the intersection of photography, video and digital technologies, although it is nurtured by a persistent interest in more traditional media ‘ sculpture especially, but also painting, drawing and architecture. Deploying a sophisticated, poetic dialogue among these media, and plumbing the depths of art history and other cultural canons, AES+F’s grand visual narratives explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere.

Dans sa performance vidéo Reza Afisina utilise son propre corps en tant que métaphore d'un individu qui se pose des questions sur les pêchés avant d'avoir reçu un certain enseignement religieux. Il transforme son propre corps en objet, ou en un emplacement sur lequel exécuter une punition pour une mauvaise action qu'il a commise alors qu'il était seil. Il veille à remplacer le Dieu par le punisseur.

The short movie Tourneur documents a bull fight in the South of France and comments in a subtle manner the disparity between the young, adrenaline rushed participants and the physically superior bull, which gets cornered by the participants. The unpredictability of the situation is increased by foam, which affects the view of the participants and the audience therefore, the encounter of humans and animal seem like an alienation in this abstract landscape of foam.

Growing up in Berlin, Yalda Afsah studied at the University of Arts Berlin, Burg Giebichenstein College of Art in Halle, and the California Institute of the Arts. She has received several awards and scholarships for her artistic work. In 2018 she received the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff scholarship and participates in the BPA // Berlin Program for Artist. She lives and works in Berlin.

Le film de Yalda Afsah, tirant son nom du Vidourle, un fleuve français, documente une chorégraphie étrange et subtilement troublante. Il met en scène un groupe de jeunes hommes, qui prennent part à ce qui pourrait être un rituel, un spectacle, un jeu ou un combat. Dans leurs mouvements collectifs, ainsi que dans les moments individuels de concentration, d'anticipation et parfois d'insouciance, les protagonistes, des adolescents pleins d'adrénaline, semblent incarner la fragilité de la condition humaine dans l'attente d'un changement environnemental, semblable à un courant de rivière d'une force inattendue.

Yalda Afsah explore la façon dont l'espace peut être construit de manière filmique, et le caractère documentaire de ses œuvres tend souvent vers des formes de théâtralité. Cette caractéristique formelle de sa pratique se reflète conceptuellement dans ses portraits documentaires à propos de relations entre l'être humain et l'animal, qui révèlent une ambivalence entre soins et contrôle, force physique et volonté brisée, instinct et manipulation. Il cherche à remettre en question et à dissoudre ces dichotomies, tout en créant un espace pour réfléchir à la possibilité d'une empathie globale entre les espèces.

A group of men is fixing their eyes onto the sky. High above, a swarm of pigeons is moving in an unrecognizable formation, when suddenly individual birds drop in mid-air, spinning backwards with their wings extended and tumbling down in a circular motion before resuming their ordinary flight path. Yalda Afsah’s short film SSRC slowly dissects this aerial choreography, revealing its nature as a form of animal training and gradually zooming into the at times almost intimate details of this interspecies relationship. Focusing on the specific social context of the Los Angeles-based „Secret Society Roller Club“ and its members’ identification with and through the animals, Afsah’s film negotiates positions of co-dependency and care, domestication and dominance – calling into question the ambivalence reflected in the symbol of the soaring bird free in its flight, yet simultaneously bound to human will.

German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah (b. 1983, Berlin) explores how space can be cinematically constructed as her films profoundly explore the interface between reality and staging. This formal characteristic of Afsah’s work is conceptually mirrored in her recent portraits of human-animal relationships that reveal an ambivalence between care and control, physical strength and broken will, instinct and manipulation. Despite their documentary focus, her films and video installations seem to capture symbiotic choreographies on screen – equally portraying and fictionalising their human and non-human protagonists. Afsah has presented her work at various exhibitions and festivals including Manifesta 13, Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and recent solo exhibitions at Kunstverein München and Halle für Kunst Steiermark. Since 2019 she is a mentor for the Berlin program for artists (BPA).

“Fata Morgana” is a critical vision of a mega-project of infrastructure, an interoceanic channel crossing the entire country that is going to be built in Nicaragua by the transnational Chinese enterprise HKND. The negative impact over the local population and the environment represents a real danger for their sustainability. Thousands of citizens from the affected areas have protested against this project, which was approved without their consideration. “Fata Morgana” is an optical illusion where one perceives objects floating on the horizon, such as cars on a highway or ships at sea; we´re playing with such symbols in this drawn stop motion animation.

Marcos lives and survives in Managua, Nicaragua. He trained as an architected at the National Engineering University in Managua (1995-1999) and later specialized in the field in Barcelona with an emphasis on urban planning and sustainable tropical architecture (2005-2009). In 2006 he won the II Exhibit of Emerging Art in Central America organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica and in 2008 he won first place at the VI Central American Visual Art Biennial. His pieces have been exhibited in the Latin American Pavilion at the Arsenale during the 55th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy (2013), the García Lorca Great Theatre of Havana during the 11th Havana Biennial (2012), New York?s Museo del Barrio as part of the ?The Street Files? exhibit (2011), Santo Domingo?s Museum of Modern Art during the I Caribbean International Triennial (2010), in two editions of the Central American Contemporary Art Biennial (Tegucigalpa 2008 and Managua 2010) as well as in several editions of the Nicaraguan Visual Art Biennial Fundación Ortèz-Gurdión (2005, 2007 and 2009), with mentions in 2007 and 2009. He has appeared in magazines like Exit-Express (Spain), Código (México) and ArtNexus (Colombia) and in anthologies like Us and Them, Young Ibero-American Artists (2010).