Catalogue > List by artist

The Mental Traveller is a poetic reflection on the nature of remembrance. It navigates through the mental spaces of people consumed by memories of lost time. The film meditates on the passing of time, external behaviors, habitual patterns of thought and the sensorial realities of five mentally disordered men inside the psychiatric ward in Chanthaburi Province, east of Thailand, in which it is filmed. The film was conceived from the director’s connections to his parents and companions as they went through states of sickness, impending death, dementia, grief, and temporary insanity. At the same time it echoes upon the turbulent years of political upheavals and repercussions in Thailand, resulting the nation in a state of delirium, lunacy and trauma.

Taiki Sakpisit is a filmmaker working in Bangkok. His works explore the underlying tensions and conflicts, and the sense of anticipation in contemporary Thailand, through precise and sensorially overwhelming audio-visual assemblage using a wide range of sounds and images. His films produce heightened and uneasy modes of spectatorship that often relate to the tumultuous socio-political climate in Thailand. Taiki’s moving images and experimental shorts have been presented at numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Yebisu International Festival for Art, Les Rencontres Internationales, Dallas Contemporary and Kunstverein Gottingen. His previous work A Ripe Volcano (2011) has been screened internationally at more than 40 film festivals and museums. His first feature film The Edge of Daybreak is currently in post-production.

A Ripe Volcano reflects Bangkok as a site of mental eruption and emotionally devastated land during the heights of terrors, primal fears, trauma, and the darkness of time. A Ripe Volcano revisits The Rattanakosin Hotel, the site where the military troops captured and tortured the civilians, students and protesters who were hiding inside the hotel during the Black May of 1992; and Rajadamnern Stadium, a Roman amphitheatre styled Muay Thai boxing arena, which was built in 1941-45 during the Second World War and since then has become the theatrical labyrinth of physical and mental explosions. The work builds around the recollections of human experiences that took place within these spaces and shifts through the mental space distilled from the possessed memory of wounded time.

Taiki Sakpisit is a visual artist and filmmaker living and working in Bangkok. Over the past years, he has been prolific as an experimental filmmaker in Thailand producing series of works that may have similar in narrative structures but vastly different in details of visual language that narrates the world of images and sound with a repetitive sense of enigmatic gloaming atmosphere. Sound has a big role in his films, by either working in collaboration with sound designer, or combining his cinematic languages with existing music, he paves to a unique situation to discover layers of meanings hidden in the stories. In latest work The Age of Anxiety (2013), he immerses into the world of sound and found footages from period Thai soap opera creating a textured and transforming experience. His works have shown in exhibitions and screened both in Thailand and many festivals abroad. (Bangkok Art and Culture Centre)

In the backyards there are sheds, a huge old tree, wild plants with wild offspring, waste scattered around. This is where they spend their time. A decaying building is about to be destroyed and someone may go beyond. Soon one of them becomes aware of the sea.

Ivan Salatic was born in 1982 in Dubrovnik and grew up in Herceg Novi. He finished the School of Fine and Applied Arts in Belgrade and graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Cetinje. He has directed several short films that have participated in festivals such as Venice Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Torino Film Festival.

AFTER THE LAW is a courtroom short movie where a tribunal of humans and objects are contaminated by an untraceable virus. This judgement addresses an unknown accident that fractured the law and eroded speech. Trough a toxic mutation of roles and shapes, evidences, gestures and haptics the court colapses its capacity of deliberation. Shot in tape has a live performance, using a single camcorder, this court was designed has a cybernetic mechanism for haptic responses were collective drive, light, vibration, face recognition and empathy collide with a synthetic voice. All speech was generated with Google WaveNet, a generative model using neural networks to simulate human voices, this protocol was explored and accelerated to find moments were the voice of the machine breaks, stutters and drives glossolalia. In 2019 the images were used as a visual score for a group of deaf teenagers to interpret in an extended signe language, exploring the gaps of description and extending them to body description of this aphasic court. The coral voices were recorded through hypnosis induced states, blending the surface frontiers that separate the body from its spatial resonators. A broken voice haunts a political paradox in a reversed bio engineering.

Jonathan Uliel Saldanha studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and devoted himself to studying the tabla - Indian percussion instrument - with the Hindu musical group Jugalbandi. He is the founder of the collective SOOPA, a visual, performative and sound laboratory, and Silorumor, a member of the Fujako duo and director of the group HHY & The Macumbas. Since 2010, he has composed several experimental sound pieces, co-created the pieces “Boca Wall”, “Shark” and “King Trilogy” and directed “Jungle Machine”, “Khorus Anima”, “The Well” and “Oxidation Machine”. , presented in venues such as Serralves, Porto - Rivoli Municipal Theater, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France) and Accès (s) Festival (Billère, France). He collaborated with artists such as Carlos Zíngaro, Steve Mackay, Adrian Sherwood, Vera Mantero, Mark Stewart, João Fiadeiro among others, and as a musician, performed in festivals such as Nyege Nyege (Uganda), Unsound (Poland), Sónar (Spain). , Primavera Sound, Amplifest, Out.Fest, Circular, Million Party, Neopop, Tapettefest (France) and Elevate (Austria). In 2019 he presented the installation Vocoder & Camouflage (Vanishing Point: works from the António Cachola collection, Torreão Nascente Lisboa), the piece “Scotoma Cintilante”, for the blind choir and score-sculpture (Porto Catholic University, São Carlos Lisbon National Theater ) at the 2019 BoCa Biennial, and “Broken Field Atlantis” a light-sheet concert (Porto Municipal Theater: Rivoli). Also in 2018, a work that precedes this exhibition, he presented the play “SØMA” where a group of deaf teenagers translate in gesture the filming of an animist court, presented at Culturgest Lisboa and at the Porto Municipal Theater: Rivoli. At the same time, he presented the exhibitions “Behemoth Republic”, in the Sonic Geometry cycle in the Archipelago São Miguel Arts Center, in the Azores and “Dismorfia”, at the Catholic University of Porto.

Life Eternal tells three intertwining stories about immortality. The first story is about Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon and his legendary search for the Fountain of Youth. The second story tells us of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were used to create the first immortal human cell line. The third story takes up James Bedford, the first person to undergo cryogenic freezing in hopes of future revival. Spanning centuries, the film installation explores the desires and emotional entanglements of these stories. At the same time, it touches upon the complex and troubling historical themes that jump out so vividly from them - colonialism, exploitation, and techno-utopianism. This work is a poetic dialogue on the eternal conversation on time, our place in a constructed reality and our attitude toward it.

Salvador Miranda is a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker, artist, and producer. His debut short film, This is my land... (2019), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR). His film installation, Life Eternal (2022), premiered at Kasseler Dokfest, received a nomination for the 2022 Golden Cube Prize, and won the 2024 Hertzog da Silva Award. His latest documentary short, Promised Land (2023), also premiered at IFFR. In addition to international screenings, his films are frequently featured in gallery and art festival settings, including Eye Filmmuseum (Netherlands), Ruhrtriennale (Germany), Proyector (Spain), and IMPAKT Festival (Netherlands). Miranda is an alumnus of the Kunstinstituut Parallel Curriculum programme and holds an MFA cum laude in Lens-Based Media from the Piet Zwart Institute.

Kaliurang in Jogjakarta is located near the active volcano Merapi, where ghosts of memories and history are part of the landscape. A subtle video is presented created specifically for 900 mdpl 2019 where local residents of the town become actors/ as ghosts. Once in a while the people of Kaliurang sees a Dutchman walking, or a Japanese soldier walking, or a Javanese woman with a jar of water, or a wild animal or a supernatural being… passing by as if they are there, living amongst us. They are hiding in the trees – like the trees and forest and the mountain are the bare witnesses of all the history of colonialism, war, and the neoliberal progress of development. A fictional work with no narrative flow. The ghosts are walking amongst us or are we the ghost?

Mark Salvatus (b. 1980) works and lives in Manila, Philippines. He studied Advertising Arts at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila. His works has been presented in different exhibitions and venues including the 2nd Lahore Biennale,; Kyoto Art Center; ISCP, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Sharjah Biennial 14; Mill6 CHAT, Hong Kong; PCAN Pavilion, Gwangju Biennale; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Osage Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin; Philippine Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale; 6th Thessaloniki Biennale; SONSBEEK International, Arnhem; 3rd Singapore Biennale; 4th Guangzhou Triennale; 14th and 16th Jakarta Biennale; Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama; Hotel Inmigrantes, Manifesta 9, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London; Hasselt (Belgique); Prologue Exhibition: Honolulu Biennale; Survival Kit Festival, Umea; Sharjah Art Foundation; Asia Society, New York; Art Center Ongoing Tokyo; Museum Baerengasse, Zurich; La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo; Cultural Center of the Philippines and Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center. He had residencies in Asia Culture Center (ACC) Gwangju, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (Amsterdam), IASPIS Umea; Art OMI, New York, Common Room Networks Foundation, Bandung, Indonesia and Goyang Art Studio in South Korea.

The Philippine Constabulary Band was a symphonic band formed in 1901 by African-American Lt. Walter Loving of the US Army’s 48th Volunteer Infantry during the American period in the Philippines. Since its first public performance on May 20, 1903, the band has brought the country international fame through its participation in international competitions, including the 1904 St. Louis Exposition in the USA, where the band placed second. In this infamous fair where live Filipinos were exhibited especially the dog-eating Igorot tribe, the band performed Rossini’s classical music ‘Willam Tell Overture’. Forward to the year 2015, the artist’s father’s has a vast vinyl record collection and one of them is a Philippine Constabulary band record that was released in the 70’s under the New Society period of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Creating a new narrative about the band and the collection, the current Philippine Army band played Rossini’s Willaiam Tell Overture after 100 years ago side by side by the vast collection of the artist’s father that were gathered slowly since the 70’s.

Mark Salvatus is a contemporary artist from Manila, Philippines. His works crosses various disciplines and media that deal with chance encounters and everyday politics creating his own narrative and visual language. Calling his works and practice as “Salvage Projects”, he has shown his projects in different international exhibitions including the Philippine Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale (2016); SONSBEEK International, Arnhem, The Netherlands (2016); Singapore Biennale (2011), Guangzhou Triennale (2011), Jakarta Biennale (2011/2015), Koganecho Bazaar, Yokohama (2011), Hotel Inmigrantes, Manifesta 9, Hasselt, Belgium (2012), Prologue Exhibition: Honolulu Biennale (2014), Survival Kit Festival, Umea, Sweden (2014) and Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2010). He had also presented his works in different museums and galleries including La Trobe University, Visual Arts Centre, Bendigo; Asia Society, New York; Museum Brengasse, Zurich; Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore; Ateneo Art Gallery; Cultural Center of the Philippines, Vargas Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Manila; Osage Foundation, Hong Kong; 1335 Mabini in Manila; Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo. Mark is a recipient of the 13 Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (2012) and Ateneo Art Awards (2010). In 2012 he founded and acts as the artistic director of 98B COLLABoratory, a multi-disciplinary site for creative sharing, discussion and collaboration.

??Once Dr. Dahesh referred to a painting made by Mrs Marie Haddad, and which showed a bird on a tree. The colours of the painting moved and took the form of flesh, blood and feathers and the bird in that painting was converted into a living bird, which was placed in a cage and remained there for several years. Its place on the linen remained white.?

Omar Fakhoury Artist, Beirut Born in 1979, Omar Fakhoury is a multidisciplinary visual artist. He holds a Bachelor in Painting and a Masters of Fine Arts Roy Samaha, Artist, Beirut Born in 1978, a video artist and photographer living and working in Beirut Lebanon where he completed a Masters degree in film studies.

This work is intended to be a way to investigate one?s own past life. It reconnects childhood homes, dreams and VHS tapes, all together what forms a body that remembers. How to make a self-portrait without giving in to the clichés of the historical archives? Once it was said: " You must understand: the memory of objects records and retains the actions of humans.... so that following generations inherit them...But it was also asked of you to leave backwards to do as if you had never come in. Things, places possess a kind of memory. When you enter a closed space, a part you remains attached to it, you lose something. You must learn to take leave without losing a parcel of your being... Learn to circulate without leaving a trace."

Born in Beirut on April 3 1978, lives and works there also as a part time news videographer. Roy Samaha majored in film studies at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), Lebanon.

Late 2010, I got commissioned by Leica to follow in the footsteps of James Bruce and document the Nile river from Alexandria to Aswan. I invited my friend Gheith El-Amine to join me on this trip. it was his first time in Egypt. December 10, 2010: we made plans to leave on February 1, 2011. He contacted two Egyptian friends of his, and we were supposed to meet them as soon as arrived there. January 25. The revolution started in Egypt. the only incoming images so far were made by protesters with cellular phones and uploaded on the net. They were much more efficient than the state-owned television station which was still doing the pro-regime propaganda in high definition resolution.

This video explores childhood anecdotes heard around an apartment, which until 1989, when a major solar storm erupted, had been inhabited by a strange couple. Some suspected them of being undercover agents while others said they were just some new age sorcerers. The work addresses the relationship between layers of history, outstanding events in nature and ancient cyphering of language; how the cycles of the Sun’s unpredictable release of energetic flares affect the magnetic fields of the earth and influence radio transmissions, communication and reason on a mass scale.

Roy Samaha is a Lebanese artist, living and working in Beirut. He explores the boundaries of filmic language, perception of reality and the memory of personal objects.

??Once Dr. Dahesh referred to a painting made by Mrs Marie Haddad, and which showed a bird on a tree. The colours of the painting moved and took the form of flesh, blood and feathers and the bird in that painting was converted into a living bird, which was placed in a cage and remained there for several years. Its place on the linen remained white.?

Omar Fakhoury Artist, Beirut Born in 1979, Omar Fakhoury is a multidisciplinary visual artist. He holds a Bachelor in Painting and a Masters of Fine Arts Roy Samaha, Artist, Beirut Born in 1978, a video artist and photographer living and working in Beirut Lebanon where he completed a Masters degree in film studies.

This work is intended to be a way to investigate one?s own past life. It reconnects childhood homes, dreams and VHS tapes, all together what forms a body that remembers. How to make a self-portrait without giving in to the clichés of the historical archives? Once it was said: " You must understand: the memory of objects records and retains the actions of humans.... so that following generations inherit them...But it was also asked of you to leave backwards to do as if you had never come in. Things, places possess a kind of memory. When you enter a closed space, a part you remains attached to it, you lose something. You must learn to take leave without losing a parcel of your being... Learn to circulate without leaving a trace."

Born in Beirut on April 3 1978, lives and works there also as a part time news videographer. Roy Samaha majored in film studies at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK), Lebanon.

At the center of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed. Reflecting on my own practice as a filmmaker working in non-fiction, the film takes a collage-like approach to examining issues around representation, verisimilitude, the ethnographic image, and the limitations of the form itself. Shot on seven different cameras (and a video synthesizer) on both film and video over the course of a decade in Sri Lanka, China, and the United States, I delve into some of my fundamental curiosities as a filmmaker.

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence within the framework of deconstructing the ethnographic image and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.

This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor, and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.

Rajee Samarasinghe was born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He later left for the United States where he is now based. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. His filmmaking practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and his work often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence within the framework of deconstructing the ethnographic image and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature film, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka—the project has received support from the Sundance Institute, Berlinale Talents' Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program. Rajee was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, and had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021. His short films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, MoMA Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, REDCAT, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, Vancouver International Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival etc. He’s received the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an Honorable Mention Award at the Thomas Edison Film Festival among others.

Tracing the colonial gaze in both the ethnographic image and forms of dominant media, this short piece describes an impressionistic encounter with a woman seen from a great distance, who shields her face from a curious telescopic lens.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker from Sri Lanka currently based in the United States. He received his BFA from UCSD and his MFA from CalArts. Rajee is currently working on his debut feature, "Your Touch Makes Others Invisible," inspired by his childhood experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war — the project received a Sundance Documentary Fund grant in 2019 and was invited to Berlinale Talents' Doc Station as well as True/False Film Festival’s inaugural PRISM program in 2020. He was also named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020. Rajee's work has been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films presented by Film Society of Lincoln Center & MoMA, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Slamdance Film Festival, REDCAT, SFFILM Festival, Media City Film Festival, Guanajuato International Film Festival etc. He's received the “Tíos Award for Best International Film” at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the “Film House Award for visionary filmmaking” at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and an "Audience Award" at CROSSROADS at SFMOMA among others.

Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.

Rajee Samarasinghe is an award-winning Sri Lankan filmmaker and visual artist. Some of his recent work examines contemporary ethnographic practices through associations of family and heritage. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Rajee`s work has been exhibited at venues internationally.

A silent poem reflecting on the place of my mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience, and touch. - Rajee Samarasinghe

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan visual artist. He received his BFA from the University of California San Diego and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Rajee`s work has been exhibited at venues internationally.

Part of an ongoing series of American psychogeographies, this particular piece investigates the idea of "remoteness," as two people establish a curious rapport in a sleepy Southern Californian suburb.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a Sri Lankan visual artist. His work often examines consciousness and impermanence. Some of his recent work develops questions into contemporary ethnographic practices. Rajee attended the University of California San Diego and is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.

A symbiotic collaboration in movie motion. After Muybridge.

Rajee Samarasinghe is a relatively young imagemaker, once upon a time Sri Lankan. He makes fake narratives and destructive formal experiments. He aspires to make videos of a respectable length and standard. Rajee attended the University of California, San Diego and is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.

A détournement of Walter Benjamin`s "Theses on the Philosophy of History," reconfigured for an era dominated by the digital, the instability of the physical body, and the seeming triumph of technology over art and the virtual over the real. Is technology the handmaiden of art? Is art the handmaiden of technology? Or is the notion of a handmaiden so hopelessly obsolete, then it can no longer provide metaphors which provoke us to think?

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, translator, and curator based in New York.

This video was produced for an exquisite corpse project by Jason Simon to be screened on Bastille Day, 2012 in Narrowsburgh, NY. I added a title to my segment and kept the first second of picture from the previous video, the starting point for my work. The title was inspired by a remark of Paul Sharits. One of his assistants had just screened a test for him of an elaborate optical printer film. The title was his response. Also, the Stones played several times on the David Frost Show. Also James Brown was Black and Proud. Also I?m going to dye my hair black and you can?t stop me.

Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, curator and translator based in New York.

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.

Scenes of people in motion. Some are working, others spend their leisure time. The sound of airplanes and subways reminds us of the city behind the piece of created nature. A short documentary with scenes from the parks of Stockholm taking place during one year.

Lucia Pagano (b. 1984) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Film School in Lodz, and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her films focus on details in everyday life, often by observing seemingly meaningless fragments of reality, sometimes to absurdity. Her films have been shown at festivals around the world, like Sao Paolo, San Francisco, Kiev, and Warsaw and has been awarded or been honorary mentioned at film festivals in LA, Oberhausen, Stockholm, and at Nordic Panorama. Vanja Sandell Billström (f. 1983) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She works both with documentary, staged situations and video installations. The films often revolve around everyday situations, and with characters that seemingly spontaneously reflect on everyday conditions or the situation that the film itself requires. Sandell Billström has earlier been nominated for the Guldbagge award, Best Swedish Short and exhibited at Göteborg Konsthall, Supermarket Art Fair, Box Gallery and Färgfabriken. ”Park” is their first film that they have directed together and it was nominated for Best Swedish Short at the Göteborg Film Festival, the Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film and won the Tempo Sound Award 2020.

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.

Scenes of people in motion. Some are working, others spend their leisure time. The sound of airplanes and subways reminds us of the city behind the piece of created nature. A short documentary with scenes from the parks of Stockholm taking place during one year.

Lucia Pagano (b. 1984) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Film School in Lodz, and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her films focus on details in everyday life, often by observing seemingly meaningless fragments of reality, sometimes to absurdity. Her films have been shown at festivals around the world, like Sao Paolo, San Francisco, Kiev, and Warsaw and has been awarded or been honorary mentioned at film festivals in LA, Oberhausen, Stockholm, and at Nordic Panorama. Vanja Sandell Billström (f. 1983) is a filmmaker and artist educated at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She works both with documentary, staged situations and video installations. The films often revolve around everyday situations, and with characters that seemingly spontaneously reflect on everyday conditions or the situation that the film itself requires. Sandell Billström has earlier been nominated for the Guldbagge award, Best Swedish Short and exhibited at Göteborg Konsthall, Supermarket Art Fair, Box Gallery and Färgfabriken. ”Park” is their first film that they have directed together and it was nominated for Best Swedish Short at the Göteborg Film Festival, the Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film and won the Tempo Sound Award 2020.

A narrator takes you on a deep dive into the art world. What mechanisms are driving this ecosystem, or rather: which participants? The animation film "À la carte" takes a humorous look at the food chain in the art field and the challenges we face.

The artist duo consisting of Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard and Bror Sander Berg Størseth constantly serve up fresh perspectives on the world, tongue in cheek, jaws scraping off the ground. In their particular case form does not follow function, but function at least contains the word fun. The objects produced by the duo are caught in between form and function, art and design, discourse and disgust. For instance: portable paintings whose support structure doubles as shipping crates, and a mobile sculpture serving you social lubrication. Or high heeled shoes with built in brushes for an easy clean, and seats reserved for magazine covers. Aurora Sander reacts to the intrinsic structures of the art world, of socialization, distribution, value creation, judgement, and accruement, to turn some tables, but making sure the tables look damned good on the way round. The references in the work of Aurora Sander are plentiful, and the usual appropriation of low culture you traditionally would find in the art is repurposed with a refined knowledge of not just the art world, but also an interest in merchandizing and hanging out, dipping low. Their artistic strategies are closely linked to design, theater, and fashion; fields that art is struggling to keep at bay. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh describes this relationship as one where high art constantly appropriates images, strategies, and mechanisms from low culture, not in order to assimilate the two, but rather to reaffirm art's position in the hierarchy. Aurora Sander seems to confuse the hierarchy, and the identity of the duo, who might be mistaken for a singular artist, a case of mistaken identity, might range from a Disney princess to an emerging artist trying to make it in the cruel marketplace of the art world. Aurora Sander's strategy of confusion, fusion, fiction and friction, seems to be the duo's strength, making objects and creating characters that belong in the art world, but have no idea how they got there.

Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman of Butte, Montana, published her diaries in 1902 and 1917. As an out queer and proto-feminist at the turn of the century, MacLane became notorious upon the publication of her 1902 diary, I Await the Devil’s Coming. She was whisked away from the industrial hellscape of her copper mining Montana hometown to a life in the public eye as an author, journalist, female film pioneer and always a provocateur - sending up social norms throughout her career, with a special focus on staid notions about women and sexuality. Between my flesh and the world’s fingers is an experimental essay and diary film primarily based on her published diaries and her film work. Though the film is not directly a personal film, the production is founded in part in the act of a woman telling her own story through that of another woman, a trailblazing figure from the past.

Talena Sanders makes moving image works that explore the development of individual and collective senses of identity in affinity groups. Her films and videos are informed by an interest in presenting the many ways that social institutions can shape individuals lives on both the broader geopolitical level and the most intimate, personal scales. A common starting point for developing new projects begins with an interest in interrogating narratives from histories and how historical records can influence senses of identity, especially as it relates to ideas of national and regional character. She believes there are endless means to present and interrogate materials from the real on the spectrum from nonfiction to narrative production approaches. Her work often places historical found/archival footage and audio in dialogue with contemporary media captured on location to question constructs of privilege and power in who gets authorized to tell the story of a shared experience. She holds an MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program and a BFA from the University of Kentucky. Her work has been screened, exhibited, and collected internationally, including at the New York Film Festival`s Views from the Avant-Garde, FID Marseille, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Fronteira Festival, Viennale, DokuFest Kosovo, BFI London Film Festival, and Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. Her first feature documentary, Liahona, is distributed by Documentary Educational Resources and Doc Alliance. She has previously taught film and video production and film studies at Duke University and the University of Montana. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sonoma State University.

Chechnya, Grozny, spring 2021. The city's landscapes are filled with portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior, and Kadyrov Junior. They watch me from every corner, infiltrating my thoughts. It’s almost impossible to believe and accept. I perceive the totalitarianism these portraits convey, viewing them intentionally through a distorted lens. I film the streets of my hometown, Grozny, from behind the tinted windows of a car, knowing that such actions put me at risk of persecution. I document a moment when fascism begins to take root in Russia—a time when, after 30 years of the Chechen people's struggle for independence, the focus shifts to indoctrinating children. In 2022, over 12,000 soldiers from Kadyrov's army are sent to war in Ukraine.

Vladlena Sandu was born in Crimea, Ukraine (USSR), in 1982 and grew up in Grozny, Chechnya, during four years of war. She graduated from VGIK in 2016 with a degree in film directing. In 2019, she completed a postgraduate degree in Art at VGIK in Aesthetics, publishing several academic articles. In 2019 graduated Boris Yukhananov's Studio for theater direction. Her works have been presented at international festivals such as the Rotterdam Film Festival, Berlinale, DocLisboa, GoEast, Movies That Matter, ZagrebDox, Geneva International Film Festival, DOK Leipzig, and others, earning international awards. At the start of the Russian war against Ukraine in March 2022, Sandu fled Russia and is now based in Amsterdam. There, she completed No Nation Without Culture about regime in Chechnya, which won Best Short Film at GoEast IFF 2023. In 2023, she also directed the autobiographical performance The Rainbow Cinema and received the Best Amsterdam Fringe 2023 Award.