Catalogue 2024
Parcourez ci-dessous le catalogue 2024 des Rencontres Internationales, ou effectuez une recherche dans les archives des oeuvres présentées depuis 2004. De nouveaux extraits vidéos sont régulièrement mis en ligne, les images et les textes sont également progressivement mis à jour.
Agnès Perrais
Ciompi
Documentaire | 16mm | couleur | 83:0 | France | 2023
À la fin du Moyen Âge, à Florence en Italie, une révolte des plus pauvres travailleurs, les Ciompi, bouleverse la ville et parvient à renverser le gouvernement. À Florence, je filme sur leurs traces, pour faire surgir les fantômes de cette révolte oubliée dans les images d’aujourd’hui. Dans les banlieues industrielles, j’en découvre les échos au présent. À Paris, je dialogue avec le chercheur militant qui a remis en lumière cette révolte. Nous questionnons ensemble l’enjeu politique de l’écriture de l’Histoire dans la construction d’une mémoire collective féconde.
Née à Paris, Agnès Perrais commence par réaliser des documentaires de création (Tant que nous sommes à bord, 2014, Magari !, 2019), en menant en parallèle une thèse de doctorat portant sur les liens entre lyrisme et politique en cinéma. Puis elle rencontre la pratique du cinéma argentique grâce aux laboratoires partagés l’Etna et l’Abominable (Navire Argo). Au sein d’une recherche plastique diverse (collages, rayogrammes...), elle poursuit actuellement son travail cinématographique en pellicule, autour de l’articulation entre politique et imaginaire, en travaillant à la fois des formes documentaires (Ciompi, 2023) et des formes courtes poétiques plus expérimentales (Marin miroir, 2021, Navire, en co-réalisation avec Lysa Heurtier Manzanares, 2017) . Elle est engagée activement dans plusieurs collectifs (L’Etna, La Poudrière, Le Navire Argo) et est membre fondateur de l’association la Surface de dernière diffusion.
Jean-baptiste Perret
La surface unique
Documentaire | hdv | couleur | 20:16 | France | 2024
A farmer tells of a series of misfortunes that affect all aspects of his farm and which he attributes to an invisible phenomenon. His words reveal that he sees his body, his family, his cattle and his electrical machinery as forming a “single surface” that is likely to be affected by such events.
After completing scientific studies in ecology, Jean-Baptiste Perret worked for several years in environmental protection. Graduating in 2018 from the Fine Art School of Lyon, France, he pursued his interest in the rural environment through a cinematographic practice composed of films and video installations. His approach is based on documentary inquiry and uses methods from anthropology that question the criteria of objectivity. Distancing himself from official narratives, he focuses on indi-viduals and their own visions of the world. Jean-Baptiste Perret films people he meets in everyday situations; he is interested in the shape of their daily lives, their environments, habits, and skills. Through various degrees of staging that willingly allow room for improvisation, subjective narratives and fictional processes intertwine. Perret’s work has notably been presented at the IAC Villeurbanne, the MAC Lyon, the Fondation Ricard, the FIDMarseille, the Festival Hors-Pistes Centre-Pompidou, the États généraux du documen-taire de Lussas and most recently at the Salon de Montrouge. Jean-Baptiste Perret is represented by Salle Principale Gallery, Paris.
Alexandros Pissourios
A full life, I suppose.
Doc. expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 25:0 | Chypre | 2023
A full life, I suppose is a filmic portrait of the time shared between the filmmaker and his mother, Androulla, combining new 16mm material shot during his recurring visits to Cyprus with Super 8mm footage shot by his father in the 1970s to chronicle the evolution of bodies and the desires that mark a life. Attempting to balance between observation and construction, the film captures dailiness and domesticity while transfiguring Androulla’s body and inhabited space through close-ups, double exposures and time-lapses. As fragments of conversations between filmmaker and mother about her life wander mostly sync-free over the images, encounters with light and darkness in the nooks and furnishings of her otherwise ordinary dwelling arouse a sense of unreality.
Born in 1982 in Limassol, Cyprus, Alexandros Pissourios lives and works London and Cyprus. Pissourios explores the possibilities inherent with 16mm film and cameras, blending ethnographic approaches with experimental cinema. Many of his films make use of people and places that are in his proximity, weaving a a body of work that explores the complexities of relating to the world around him. Selected screenings/exhibitions of his films include London Short Film Festival (2024), FilmDairy NYC (2024), Annual Copenhagen Film Festival (2024), Lemesos International Documentary Festival (2023/2020), Cubitt Gallery London (2023), Queerwave festival (2023), Supernormal Festival (2017), International Ankara Film Festival (2016) ICA/Lux Moving image Biennial (2012), Fringe! Film Festival (2012), London Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (2011)
Fernanda Polacow
Big Bang Henda
Doc. expérimental | digital | couleur | 22:0 | Brésil, Portugal | 2023
Renversant statues et symboles, construisant de nouveaux souvenirs, encadrant le paysage détruit, écrivant des lettres pour l'avenir, inversant les dynamiques de pouvoir : BIG BANG HENDA est un documentaire-poésie-manifeste sur le travail de l'artiste angolais Kiluanji Kia Henda. Il nous emmène dans un voyage à travers ses créations et réflexions, qui sont à l'avant-garde de la pensée anticoloniale, nous exhortant à réfléchir sur la manière dont les générations qui ont grandi pendant ou à la suite de la guerre réinterprètent cet événement.
Fernanda is a screenwriter and director, living between Brazil and Portugal. She has been working in the intersections between Brazil, Portugual and the African Portuguese speaking countries and former colonies of Portugal for decades. Her first feature as a writer, Mosquito, was the opening film at the Rotterdam FF (2020) and won the Critics Prize at the São Paulo International FF (2020) besides touring dozens of festivals. Her second feature, The Last Summer, is currently in production after being selected for the Script Station at Berlinale 2023 and RACCONTI. She has been developing, writing, and directing for TV, streaming and cinema, and some of her works have received awards and nominations at the Brazilian Cinema Academy, New York TV&Film Festival, Hollywood Woman’s FF, among others. She is part of the Torino Film Lab 2023. She is a co-founder of MUTIM, a woman in film association in Portugal.
Marlies Pöschl
Vivo Vision
VR vidéo 360 | mp4 | couleur | 34:30 | Autriche | 2024
The young Swiss economist Hans travels to Thailand with his mum to visit his grandmother in “Vita Bona”, a care home for European seniors. The facility has changed its name and is hard to find at first. When they finally arrive, it is completely different from what they expected: a perfectly styled wellness retreat for young people. While Hans indulges in the beauty of the place, Daniela wanders through the labyrinthine complex in search of her mother and observes strange occurrences. Where are the senior citizens? What is the manager Mrs. Vasall hiding behind her charming smile? This conceptual VR film is a dystopian parable about the outsourcing of care work, as produced by our neo-colonialist globalized economic system. “Vivo Vision” refers to a way of seeing that Ms. Vasall, the manager of the resort, has invented. Wellness retreat and retirement home are present in the same place, but without interfering with each other. While the young people practice yoga poses by the pool, the seniors and workers have been relocated to another, invisible level. “Vivo Vision” is a view of the world in which everything that is considered unproductive in a capitalist logic has become invisible.
MARLIES POESCHL is an artist, filmmaker, curator and educator. She is currently based in Vienna (AT), where she teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, but has previously worked in France, Iran, Thailand and China. Shifting between artistic, curatorial and educational approaches, Pöschl is interested in art as a form of knowledge production. She understands filmmaking as social practice and often collaborates with actors from outside the art world in search for polyphonic narrations and open-ended dramaturgies. Since 2018 Pöschl has focused on ways in which societies of the global north respond to the ‘care crisis’. Pöschl has received various prizes for her work: in 2022 she was granted the state scholarship for media art, in 2021 the Young Artist’s Award (City of Vienna). Her films and installations have been shown in several solo presentations, a.o. Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, DE (2022), Salzburger Kunstverein, AT (2021), CAC Brétigny, (2018) and MUSA, Vienna, AT (2016). She has participated in biennales and film festivals such as the Vienna Biennale for Change (AT), Antimatter media art festival (CA), Edinburgh International Film Festival (GB), Cinema Verité (IR), Diagonale (AT) and others. Her work is distributed by VTape and The Golden Pixel Cooperative.
Julian Rabus
Sunstrokes - Kevin
Fiction expérimentale | mov | couleur | 10:38 | Suisse, USA | 2024
SUNSTROKES is a method-driven and improvisation based film project produced and directed by Julian Rabus. Twenty-year-old Rachel moves from New York to Los Angeles in order to reinvent herself. Still attached to classical role models at first, she increasingly comes into conflict with them in her new environment and, in conversations with her new friends, begins to redefine her expectations of life and discover other sides to herself. This film was created in close collaboration between the director and the actors over a period of two years and a total of 32 days of shooting in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. The work consists of several chapters, of which this one focuses on the relationship between Rachel and Kevin.
Julian Rabus, born and raised in Berlin, Germany, was an assistant cameraman and assistant director in film and television before beginning a degree in fine arts / media art under Prof. Julian Rosefeldt at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, which he received with honours in 2021. Since then he has been studying at the Berlin University of the Arts in Prof. Thomas Arslan’s class on narrative film. In between, he also attended the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design under Prof. Serpil Turhan and the California Institute of Arts under Prof. James Benning.
Andrii Rachynskyi, Daniil Revkovskyi
Civilians. Invasion
Documentaire | mp4 | couleur | 56:38 | Ukraine | 2023
"Civilians. Invasion", created in 2023. The film documents the experiences of Ukrainians during the Russian aggression against Ukraine. This invasion led to extensive documentation by civilians, soldiers, and journalists, resulting in a wealth of photo and video materials that made their way onto social media platforms. While some of this content went viral through Telegram channels and other social networks, many photos and videos remained relatively unknown with minimal views. The film is structured around a specific storyline, starting from the initial days of the invasion and unfolding the events related to how people navigate a new reality: how to live and survive, the risks faced by civilians during the conflict, episodes of housing destruction, and stories of those who have lost their loved ones. In 2024 "Civilians. Invasion" represents Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale.
Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi are the Kharkiv (Ukraine) artists who are fusing different formats of artistic practices (installations, reenactment, video, archives), researching the contexts and landscapes of the industrial regions of Ukraine. They graduated from the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Art with a degree in graphic design. Nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize in 2018, 2020 and 2022, the winners of the 2020 PinchukArtCentre Prize Audience Award for the project “Hooligans.” Allegro Prize 2022 winners. In 2024, Andrii Rachinskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi represent Ukraine at the 60th Venice Biennale. https://revkovskyirachynskyi.com
Jules Ramage
The Bird
Doc. expérimental | digital | couleur | 11:39 | France | 2023
During her incarceration, Gauche described her daily life in pages that she slammed in the prison yard. On these occasions, she also invited her fellow inmates to sit in a circle and share their stories, which she noted in her notebook. Six months later, she performs these documents on the film set, testifying for the institutional control over bodies and sexualities, the violence of imposed medical treatments, and the absolute strenght of sorority as a condition for survival.
Jules Ramage (1987, France) is an intersex visual artist and researcher. Associated with the CERILAC laboratory at the University of Paris, he is also a member of the Cité du Genre, interdisciplinary research institute in gender studies. He explores the complex relationships of power at play in disciplinary and institutional structures. Since 2013, he has conducted in-depth fieldwork in the prison space, where he implements collaborative protocols with inmates. Their work has been exhibited in France, the United States, Argentina, England, Spain, and Germany.
Mary-audrey Ramirez
Forced Amnesia
Installation multimédia | hdv | couleur | 0:0 | Luxembourg | 2024
The game follows ideas such as design by subtraction. A world devoid of time and space where the great dichotomies of human thought no longer cast a shadow. A post-anthropocentric world with a non-hierarchical structure. Here we cannot orient ourselves, which defies our understanding in a refreshing way and makes us forget - at least for a few moments - who we are; where we come from; and that we believe we are of particular importance. Forced Amnesia follows a simple instruction pattern: explore and you will find. As it is devoid of language all we have to do is follow our instinct. What we learned in games that we played before. The idea for Forced Amnesia started 2023 as an art exhibition, which led to the development of a video game. Forced Amnesia is a game with focus on quiet moments, inspired by the concept of design by subtraction, philosophy introduced by Fumito Ueda. The game gives the player lots of space to navigate through. Forced Amnesia’s aesthetics moves through a stage of comforting uncertainty, the player does not know if they are above or under water, swinging or flying. This state, fused with a calm soothing musical score creates a space for relaxation and calm. Places that nowadays are getting increasingly harder to find. Forced Amnesia aims at an older generation of gamers. Gen X and Gen Y will be the first generation to grow old playing video games. As we slowly age, our lifestyle and perception changes, Forced Amnesia is there to accompany us.
Mary-Audrey Ramirez studied under Thomas Zipp at the University of the Arts in Berlin Germany from 2010 to 2016. In 2019 she was the recipient of the prestigious Edward Steichen Award in Luxembourg for her textile-based sculptural and pictorial works. Early 2025 Ramirez’s Qrst percent for art work will be Qnalized in Berlin Spandau. Her works have been shown in both solo and group exhibitions at institutions such as Casino Luxembourg, forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg; Kunsthalle Gießen, Gießen; Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund; TRAUMA BAR UND KINO, Berlin; Kai 10 Arthena Foundation, D sseldorf; Haus Mödrath, Kerpen; Margot Samel Gallery, New York City; Polansky Gallery, Prague and MARTINETZ, Cologne. She was also part of Esch2022+ARS ELECTRONICA, Luxembourg/Linz. “Ramirez creates a dense image of a world with her figurative representations in pictures, objects and games, It is a world devoid of time and space where the great dichotomies of human thought no longer play a role. A post-anthropocentric world that is not organised hierarchically. A world in which we cannot orientate ourselves, which defies our understanding in a refreshing way and makes us forget, at least for a few moments, who we are, where we come from and that we believe we are of particular importance” - (Annekathrin Kohout)
Enrique Ramirez
Las tres memorias
Fiction expérimentale | 4k | couleur | 15:54 | Chili | 2023
A man with no memory walks through the hall of honor of the former national congress of Chile, a place that was closed during the military dictatorship and that has become an important place again during the writing of the two new failed constitutions in Chile. In front of him is the famous painting of Pedro Subercaseaux that represents the discovery of Chile, this man without memory tries to remember our national anthem. Through this effort is built this film that seeks to make us travel inside an imaginary landscape in the heart of the History and architecture of the main hall of governmental power in Chile, where all presidents promised a fairer and better country ... this landscape is Chile : an experiment of neoliberalism that, despite everything, continues to breathe on our sky and dream
Enrique Ramírez was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2007, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Parque de la memoria en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel, Ramírez is nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2020
Alsalah Razan
A Stone’s Throw
Film expérimental | 16mm | couleur et n&b | 40:0 | Palestine | 2024
Amine, a Palestinian elder, is exiled twice from land and labour. He is displaced from his birthplace Haifa seeking refuge in Beirut, and again to Zirku Island, for work on an offshore oil platform and work camp in the Arab Gulf. "A Stone’s Throw" trespasses borders to reveal an emotional and material proximity between the extraction of oil and labour in the region and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. The film rehearses a history of the Palestinian resistance when, in 1936, the oil labourers of Haifa blow up a BP pipeline.
Razan is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal.
Louis-cyprien Rials
Babel
Vidéo expérimentale | 4k | couleur | 12:18 | France, Iraq | 2023
Babel est une prise de vue par drone centrée sur la Ziggurat de Borsippa, qui a longtemps été considérée comme les vestiges de la Tour de Babel avant qu'un emplacement plus probable de l'édifice ne soit trouvé. Notre imagination a été nourrie par le récit de la Genèse, qui a popularisé cette construction aussi démesurée que l'orgueil du peuple qui l'a bâtie. Elle marquait l'incapacité de l'humanité à atteindre le ciel, malgré ses efforts pour construire un monument d'une élévation sans précédent. Et la situation contemporaine de Babylone, capitale cosmopolite d'un empire qui couvrait alors tout le Proche-Orient, illustrait bien la diversité des langues qui fut la conséquence de l'échec de la tentative. Dans la bande sonore, une composition de Romain Poirier et des extraits de la Genèse sont traduits et lus par deux programmes d'intelligence artificielle (DeepL et ElevenLabs), redéfinissant le lien permanent entre les tentatives de l'humanité de reconstruire - virtuellement cette fois - la Tour de Babel grâce à l'intelligence artificielle et au transhumanisme, et les erreurs sans cesse renouvelées de l'humanité.
The Middle East, countries that are not internationally recognized, radioactive or forbidden zones considered as “involuntary natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has traveled or inhabited. The artist, born in Paris in 1981, uses video and photography to present a silent, sometimes mystical image of these areas marked by past violence or agitated by major conflicts. These moving pictures composed of fixed shots, often long and devoid of human presence, tell of the impossibility of capturing these abandoned and transformed spaces, impregnated with beliefs and strewn with stigmata.
Amanda Rice
The Flesh of Language
Film expérimental | 4K | couleur | 16:32 | Irlande | 2023
THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE draws connections between zoological research related to the extinct ‘Irish Elk’, parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive’s EVP tape recordings and tactics of media preservation as explained by an archivist. Analogies are drawn between extinct deer and dying media formats which come head to head in a choreographed, exuberant species-resurrection scene.
Amanda Rice is as artist and filmmaker based between London and Belfast. Her films have been presented at the BFI London Film Festival (UK) Eva International Biennial (Ireland), Flux Factory (New York), Eastlink Gallery (Shanghai) CCA Glasgow, Arebyte Gallery (London) M8 Space Aalto University (Helsinki), Irish Film Institute (Dublin), the Wrong Biennale and aemi's 2024 international touring film programme 'Spirit Messages'. Awards include Edward Allington Memorial Prize, awarded by UCL Slade and Next Generation Bursary, awarded by the Arts Council of Ireland. She is an MA graduate of the Slade School of Art. Her film 'The Flesh of Language' is in the permanent collection of the Arts Council of Ireland.
Mykola Ridnyi
The Battle over Mazepa
Vidéo | 4k | couleur | 26:43 | Ukraine | 2023
The Battle Over Mazepa conceptualises the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporizhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century. Addressing codes of hip-hop culture, Ridnyi borrows the popular form of a rap battle to collide two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Mazeppa by Lord Byron in 1819 and Poltava by Alexander Pushkin in 1828–29. While Byron envisions Mazepa as a romantic hero, seized by love, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor in accordance with the colonial attitude of the Russian Empire. Highlighting the confrontation of these two texts, Ridnyi invited four rappers from different national and cultural backgrounds to write and perform their response to the poets’ lyrics.
Mykola Ridnyi (born in Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker and educator. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His works reflect social and political realities by drawing on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The body of his work created within the last decade address the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language. Ridnyi's works has been shown internationally including the Schinkel pavilion, Transmediale and DAAD gallery in Berlin, Albertinum in Dresden, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, the 56-th Venice Biennale, The Kyiv Biennale and other venues and events.
Dylan Rizzo
Nogooddream
Film expérimental | 35mm | couleur | 3:14 | USA | 2024
A man wakes up in a nightmare where he finds his grandmother's favorite tree burning outside his window, and is haunted by whispers of his childhood. The text is adapted from a page in my notes app dedicated to things my younger sister says that I find strange, or sad, or hopeful. The images are from a recurring nightmare. This film was shot on 500 ft of 5219 Kodak 35mm film stock.
Dylan Rizzo is a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City. He is currently pursuing his MFA in directing at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. His work draws from his experiences as a native New Yorker and Chinese - Italian American, often dissecting the meaning of memory and how reconciling the past informs the process of becoming. Last year he completed a 18 min short film titled “One Day I’ll Open My Fist”, shot on location in NYC’s Chinatown on 16mm film. It is currently being submitted to festivals.
Francisco Rodriguez Teare
Octubre al mediodía
Doc. expérimental | 16mm | couleur | 12:0 | Chili | 2024
A spring afternoon on the San Cristobal hill, in downtown Santiago de Chile. Four friends and a sound engineer talk about the events seen and experienced during the popular revolt that began in 2019 in Chile. The film brings to the surface certain conversations related to any revolution: hope, disillusionment, fire, torture and police violence. The name of the film comes from the poem April Noon by Eileen Myles.
Francisco Rodríguez Teare is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in France with a moving image practice working predominantly with film, video and installation. Since 2015 he has been creating works and exhibiting them both in film festival circuits and contemporary art contexts. He has directed the shorts Appels téléphononiques, Una luna de hierro, Why are they equipped with eyes ?, Octubre al mediodía, El oro y el pez. The video installations and performances Gois, Colored Procession, This dream is mine and the hybrid feature film Otro sol. Recently his work has been presented at film festivals and museums as New Directors/New Films at MoMA, Toronto FIlm Festival, 62 New York Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Taipei Biennial, Stedelijk Museum, Cinémathèque Française, Mar del Plata IFF, CPH:DOX, Shanghai IFF, IndieLisboa, FID Marseille, Viennale.
Stéphanie Rollin, Brognon Rollin
The Most Beautiful Attempt (11 years after), 2023
Vidéo | mp4 | couleur | 11:3 | Luxembourg | 2023
Lancé dans une course poursuite avec le soleil initiée en 2012 dans « The Most Beautiful Attempt » Anton, 25 ans maintenant, pousse toujours inlassablement des cristaux de sel pour les tenir dans la lumière.
David Brognon, né en 1978 à Messancy (B), et Stéphanie Rollin, née en 1980 à Luxembourg (L), vivent et travaillent à Paris et Luxembourg. Les deux artistes démarrent leur collaboration en 2006, après leur rencontre au MUDAM de Luxembourg. Ensemble, ils développent un travail singulier (installations, sculptures-objets, vidéos, performances, photos), dont l’humain est le matériau principal et la rencontre le moteur. A partir de situations réelles et le plus souvent complexes, ils donnent corps à l’expérience du temps, de la durée ou de l’attente, en prise directe avec la matérialité d’un territoire et de ses limites – en particulier dans le contexte de situations d’enfermement. Attentifs à la marge plutôt qu’au centre, les artistes s’intéressent aux interstices flous où la société cantonne celles et ceux qu’elle marginalise ou invisibilise. « Notre univers, c’est la périphérie, c’est cet espace-temps qu’on ne veut pas voir ».
Peter Rose
A Sign of the Times
Vidéo expérimentale | mp4 | couleur | 1:46 | USA | 2021
A veiled metaphor for the instabilities of our times shot with a low-res Flip Camera
Peter Rose’s works in film, video, installation, and performance have received extensive national and international exhibition, including shows at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and more recently at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Rose is concerned with new forms of vision, improvisations in fictitious languages, and the pleasures of obscure journeys. The work is included in several major international collections.
Sergei Rostropovich
Archipelago
Vidéo | digital | noir et blanc | 10:26 | Allemagne | 2023
ARCHIPELAGO was filmed in the ruins of a former Soviet gulag, where prisoners were forced into hard labor to quarry limestone. After the collapse of the USSR, the infrastructure that prevented flooding fell into disrepair, submerging the prison beneath the waters of Lake Rummu in Estonia. In recent years, Estonian authorities have transformed the area into a recreational park, inviting tourists and families to explore this once-hidden place—a layered testament to collective memory and history. Through a blend of static and weightless filming styles, Archipelago contemplates the passage of time and nature’s quiet reclamation, offering a reflective perspective on impermanence and transformation
Sergei Rostropovich (b. 1986) is a New York-born filmmaker and photographer based in Paris. After graduating from the International Film School of Paris, he began his career as an assistant director on Faust by Alexander Sokurov, which won the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. He went on to direct a range of short films, including Ophelia, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014, marking his shift toward non-narrative video work. Rostropovich’s art explores the fleeting nature of human experience, balancing moments of celebration and ritual against darker themes of violence and inevitable decay. Through his video and photographic work, he contemplates life’s fragile beauty and the quiet, constant force of entropy, capturing a world where joy and impermanence are inextricably linked.
Georgie Roxby Smith, NA
Just Breathe
Vidéo expérimentale | mp4 | couleur | 2:39 | Australie | 2024
'Just Breathe' merges GTAV in-game machinima selfies with AI to probe the intersection of virtual realities and human identity. The work infuses AI-induced physiological functions into a digital avatar, typically constrained by game mechanics, highlighting the duality of entrapment and perceived freedom in digital personas and gaming experiences. The piece is accompanied by an ambient soundscape, drawn from the game itself and IRL sounds to blur the distinctions between the digital and physical selves. It challenges viewers to reflect on the boundaries and interactions between virtual and real identities. Through 'Just Breathe', Smith prompts a re-evaluation of identity, presence, and reality in the digital era, exploring how online spaces both mirror and distort our physical existence.
Georgie Roxby Smith works across a range of disciplines exploring new pathways between virtual and physical worlds. Employing a variety of tools - including 3D graphics, live performance, shared virtual and gaming spaces, installation and projection - these works explore the increasingly blurred border between identity, materiality, reality, virtuality and fantasy in contemporary culture. In 2010 Georgie was selected for The Watermill Center Spring Residency Program, NY, by an international selection committee of cultural leaders including Marina Abramovi?, Alanna Heiss & Robert Wilson. In 2011 Georgie completed her MFA at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. Since 2012 Georgie has been focusing on online identity, gender representation and violence in video games, particularly that directed towards women on screen and in online communities. Most recently she has been utilising AI in video collages exploring digital portraits. Georgie has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally including Art in Odd Places, New York, (where her work was featured in Time Out NY), Prospectives International Festival of Digital Art Nevada, Game Art Festival at Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Gamerz Festival (FR), Festival Miden (GR) and Generation i.2 - Aesthetics of the Digital in the 21st Century at Edith Russ Huas for Media Art (DE). Other highlights include curating and showing in NOW13:New Media Art Now, Substation Contemporary Art Prize and Self Help at Rawson Projects Brooklyn, curated by Jocelyn Miller (MoMa PS1). Awards and grants include the Australia Council of the Arts New Work, Artstart, Nellie Castan Award, Australian Postgraduate Award, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Dame Joan Sutherland Fund and the Eldon and Anne Foote Trust Travel Grant.
Eoghan Ryan
Circle A
Vidéo expérimentale | 4k | couleur | 29:11 | Irlande, Pays-Bas | 2023
Circle A departs from a heavily edited conversation between five strangers in an art bookshop. Their discussion circulates around the term 'Anarchy', including its abstraction and how the word functions in both an imaginary and a real way. It is cut alongside footage from the Las Fallas festival, Valencia, a five-day celebration of fire and pyrotechnics as well as interjections from the late author, social theorist and orator Murray Bookchin, who coined the term ‘Lifestyle Anarchism’. Threaded throughout the film are hundreds of newspaper clippings from an open archive. The soundtrack of drums, pops and explosions fall in and out of syncopation, providing driving rhythm and moments of rupture. Circle A inserts Anarchy as an aspirational conceit both on micro and macro level into the language of the everyday spectator. If Anarchy is affirmed as a response to order, the film puts full emphasis on the word ‘response’. In other words, the work is a thought experiment on how to begin to undo a system.
Eoghan Ryan (b. 1987, Dublin, IRE) is based between Brussels, Amsterdam and Dublin. He works across moving image, installation, performance, puppetry and collage. His process engages collective and personal trauma, power dynamics, double speak, acting and reacting to play out disintegrations of mediated language. This often involves confusing and dismantling notions of ‘European’ states of identity, ranging from nation states and states of being to the cultivation of provisional culture, in art as much as bacteria. Recent and selected shows, performances and screenings have taken place at The Complex (IE), Edith Russ Haus(DE), Centrale Fies (IT), ICA London (UK), Busan Biennale (KR) IFFR, Rotterdam (NL), Visio (IT) Foundation Pernot Ricard (FR) Kunstervein Freiburg (DE) South London Gallery (UK) Serralves Museum (PR) and IMMA (IE). He is currently developing a new project for EVA biennale 2025(IE)