Catalogue 2025

In 2017 Angola launched its first satellite into space… and it was shortly declared lost. As Aventuras do Angosat is thed dream born from that frustrated endeavour, in the form of a musical film written and performed by Isis Hembe, one of the leading names in Angolan urban music, here transformed into Man Ré. Filmed in a single take in the Cazenga district of Luanda with new emerging talents.

Resem Verkron (1999) is part of two leading prominent cultural movements in Luanda: the urban art collective Verkron Collective and Geração 80. His debut short, Lola & Mami (2021), explored toxic masculinity. Marc Serena (1983) codirected the award-winning documentary Tchindas (2015), broadcast on PBS in the United States. His feature El escritor de un país sin librerías premiered at l’Alternativa and won a DIG Award for outstanding European investigative journalism.

Chasing The Dot (2021-ongoing) is an immersive rollercoaster of light and colour, a sensorial plunge into the limits of perception. Within a vast, horizonless Ganzfeld space, the audience floats through storm-like fields of colour, blazing with indirect light, 1 million lumen waves carrying vivid after-images. At the centre of their gaze, a single floating point, he foveal dot, flares to life and remains fixed, no matter where the eye turns. Premiered at Rijksmuseum Twenthe, this installation explores stroboscopic thresholds and synaesthesia. Inspired by Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, the meticulously crafted light score fragments and reassembles vision, prompting open-eye hallucinations. Viewers experience a sensory fusion, seeing with their ears and listening with their eyes. Every modulation of hue, frequency, and decay reveals the hidden architecture of consciousness, exposing its hinges and seams. The audio emerges directly from the humming, pulsing, and crackling of the powerful lights, intertwining seamlessly with the visual hallucinations. It sounds like a rhythmic, electric storm rich, textured, and hypnotically synchronized with waves of colour. Here, light becomes tangible matter. Perception transforms into choreographed dance, casting each viewer as co-author. The artwork completes itself when spectators close their eyes, creating private cinemas behind their eyelids. Chasing The Dot demonstrates how flexible our perception of reality truly is, highlighting how astonishingly fine tuned our brains are in creating consciousness.

Philip Vermeulen is a Dutch artist who explores the fundamentals of human perception. His installations are to be experienced with the whole body, while challenging the physicality of light and sound, movement and vibrations. Vermeulen experiments with a variety of elements including motion, light, sound compositions, physics, nature, and digital technology, creating hypersculptures that appeal to and trick the senses of the spectator. These kinetic works act as a catalyst, dissolving the boundaries between mind and material, creating new realms of imagination and challenging perspectives. His installations have been exhibited in museums such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (NL), Rijksmuseum Twenthe (NL), Museum Voorlinden (Wassenaar, NL), Museum for International Light Art (Unna, DE), iMAL (Brussels, BE), Light Art Museum (Budapest, HU), Industrial Art Biennial (Labin, HR) and ART Rotterdam (NL). Works have also been featured at media festivals, including Sonic Acts (Amsterdam, NL), Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Festival Interstice (Caen, FR), Mapping Festival (Geneva, CH), Novas Freque?ncias (Rio de Janeiro, BR) and CTM at Halle am Berghain (Berlin, DE). In 2024, Vermeulen will present his first large-scale solo exhibition Chasing The Dot at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe.

Lizzy is the result of the days spent in the aftermath of the death of a neighbour, who passed in the house where she had lived out her whole life on the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida and who left behind an electric organ addressed to the filmmaker, without a note. To receive it was like a wild riddle.How might one story continue in the hands of another? What powers organize the telling? Through weaving indoors with outdoors, dust with swamp, celebration with critique, the film traverses binary notions such as self-world, truth-fiction, witnessing-imagining and nature-experience among others.

Susanna Wallin is an artist and filmmaker engaged in questions regarding what to do with our time, our bodies and the tools we are given to live a life. She probes subject matter across diverse contexts, modalities and timescales, often immersing herself in a particular place over extended periods. She is attentive to what emerges in hesitation, together, through experimentation and open ended, lending an ear to the unspoken with fiction as practice. Born and raised in Sweden, she studied filmmaking and art practice/theory at Goldsmiths College and University of the Arts London in the UK. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including The Flamin London Artist Film and Video Award, New Approaches, Film London UK, Pure Fiction, Sweden and commissions from the UK Film Council, Channel 4, BBC, Arts Council England, Arte France/Germany, SVT, Sweden and the BFI in the UK. Her award-winning films are shown in cinema and gallery contexts and have appeared in venues such as MOCA LA, The American Cinematheque, The Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery, The London Underground, ICA and the British Film Institute. In recent years, Wallin has been developing several feature length film projects, one of which is set in Florida and now in post production. She is part of the Research School at University of the Arts London in the UK completing a PhD through practice and is Assistant Professor of Film and Video at University of South Florida in the US. She lives and works between Tampa and London.

These images appear in this world all because of an 18-year-old gypsy boy, Pisti. A chance encounter an existing gap in our chain of cause and effect. Like opening the door but realising there is no end, and now it cannot be closed no matter what. “I” is a place where events take place, an existential exploration.

WANG Chun (b. 1988, Taiwan) is a video production worker and film producer. His practice is based on transformations between different creative languages (those of image, text, sound, and body), searching for the limits of language and seeking to measure the distance in the act of viewing.

The video Berlin-Lichtenberg uses footage from a home movie filmed in 1943. The apparent intention of the filmmaker – to capture peaceful moments of family life such as a wife and child on a walk or leisure time at a lakeside restaurant in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg – is disrupted by unintended visual content. In the background, everyday life in the forced labour system becomes visible: a group of female forced labourers on the way to their work site, and the barracks of a forced labour camp behind the excursion venue. These visual elements are not consciously chosen, but rather a casual documentation of the omnipresence of forced labour in Nazi Germany. The amateur footage has been re-edited for the video with intertitles that contextualise the silent images and add a fictional level.

In his artistic work, Franz Wanner (*1975 in Bad Tölz, Germany, lives in Zurich) addresses topics such as the European Union’s migration policy, the German secret service and the arms industry, as well as their history and current structures, and the effects of Nazism on the German imperative of prosperity. “In a conceptual practice whose consistency of research and artistic output, in the tradition of Hans Haacke, continues – by means of investigations and transmedia – to ask questions where no one has yet done so” (Nora Sternfeld, HFBK Hamburg), “he creates images of a collective cognitive dissonance and analytical poetry about the pathology of overlooking within the Germany of today and its idioms” (Stephanie Weber, Lenbachhaus Munich). As Artist in Residence at the Harun Farocki Institute, he developed the exhibition Mind the Memory Gap for the KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Under the title Eingestellte Gegenwarten, he realised his first solo exhibition in Italy at Merano Arte, which will be shown in modified form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 2026.

A peasant’s wife loses her way in the forest and stumbles into a bear’s den. The bear keeps her with him, and after a time, a half-bear, half-child is born. They long to escape. To this backdrop, we move through the corridors and streets of a deserted German military town, once the central headquarters of the Soviet army’s occupation of Eastern Europe. Sealed off to the public for decades, this obscure complex became known to outsiders as “the Forbidden City.” A primal Russian fairy tale is employed to navigate this labyrinthine site, which appears to speak to both the legacy of this contested past and the unsettling resonances of our present.

Feargal Ward and Jonathan Sammon are filmmaking artists from Ireland. Much of their work explores the boundaries and possibilities of the hybrid-documentary form, where tropes and devices of narrative cinema are often appropriated or subverted in an attempt to interrogate established truths. Previous films they have collaborated on include 'Tin City', which premiered at this year’s Berlinale (Forum Expanded) before screening at multiple festivals including Karlovy Vary, Cinéma du Réel, and Festival dei Popoli, where it was awarded the International Discoveries Prize. Other collaborations involving Adrian Duncan include the films 'Lowland' (Cork International Film Festival), 'Memory Room' (IDFA, EVA International, Dokufest Kosovo), and 'Tension Structures' (IDFA, Hot Docs, RIDM). Ward’s feature documentary 'The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid' premiered in the main competition at IDFA and screened at multiple festivals before being broadcast on German, Irish, and Finnish television. His debut feature documentary 'Yximalloo' (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan) premiered at FID Marseille, where it won the Prix Premier

In the marshlands of southern Iraq, Ibrahim and his family live isolated from the rest of the world, deeply intertwined with the river, the reeds and the animals they tend. The quiet and withdrawn Ibrahim finds solace only in his buffalo, his one true companion. As Ibrahim’s world collapses, he must confront forces beyond his control that threaten not only his way of life but also the one living creature he truly understands.

Ali Yahya is an Iraqi filmmaker, born in 1994 in Baghdad, where he has lived and worked his entire life. His journey began after studying Psychology at the bachelor’s level. He later moved into visual arts, first as a graphic designer and then as a Creative Director at Becorp, one of Iraq’s leading creative agencies, where he continues to lead visual storytelling and cultural-visual projects. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Film. He uses film to explore the human experience, capturing the beauty and complexities of everyday life. Through his work, he brings the stories of his homeland to the world. His debut short film Beneath Which Rivers Flow (2025), shot in the marshlands of southern Iraq, blends poetic observation with lived reality, exploring the fragile relationship between a community and its disappearing landscape. The film premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention from the jury.

The film moves through the hidden storage spaces of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, revealing artworks whose ownership records remain incomplete. Some bear traces of wartime displacement and intentional omissions; others have shifted in attribution, altering the narratives attached to them. It traces how institutional structures shape what becomes visible and what remains unresolved. As the camera moves through the storage rooms, “Coming Home” observes the museum as an active system of organization, where artworks are continually recontextualized. Viewers encounter the collection as an unseen archive and are asked to navigate a place where certainty is partial and orientation never fixed.

Jinjoo Yang is a Montreal-based artist and architect whose films emerge from direct engagement with specific sites. She works with institutional interiors, using controlled camera movement to trace how places hold and mediate their histories. Her practice moves between observation and construction, turning regulated environments into temporal landscapes where visibility, authorship, and memory subtly shift. Yang’s recent works include “Coming Home,” filmed in the collection storage of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and “Occupied,” a forthcoming film shaped by Cold War infrastructures. Her projects have been presented internationally at institutions such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Center for Architecture in New York, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.

Opus III explores the landscape of the Atlas Mountains as both a physical territory and a symbolic topos. Filmed between Tunisia and Morocco, the work expands the research initiated in Opus I and II by confronting the visible landscape with its mythological echoes. The piece considers the Atlas not only as a geographical massif but as an archetypal figure shaped by recurring narratives, beliefs and collective memories. Through a slow and contemplative visual language, Opus III becomes a passage between the material presence of the mountains and the intangible layers of meaning that inhabit them. The work invites the viewer to shift perspective and enter a space where landscape, myth and perception intertwine.

Haythem Zakaria is a transdisciplinary artist and sound performer born in 1983 in Tunisia and based in France. Working across video, installation, photography, drawing and sound, he explores how landscapes, myths and forms of memory shape perception, and how the visible can open onto more elusive dimensions of experience. His practice is grounded in field research, slow temporalities and a refined attention to the resonance of places. Since 2010, his work has been presented internationally in major exhibitions, biennials and independent art spaces across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and North America, including documenta 15, the Venice Biennale, the Japan Media Arts Festival, Cairotronica, Dream City, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Casa Árabe and numerous institutions in Paris, London, Berlin, Beijing, Rabat, Tokyo and San Francisco. Recipient of the Grand Prize at the Japan Media Arts Festival for Interstices, Zakaria continues to develop research-based projects where image, sound and matter intersect, forming a space of inquiry into archetypes, memory and the thresholds between the visible and the unseen.

In the summer of 2023, the government of Jiujiang launched the Gan Tang Lake Cleansing Project. Within weeks, this ancient lake with over two millennia of history was drained. Nearby in Gan Tang Park, a boy wakes up in the rain. There, the destiny of Gan Tang awaits.

Tianming Zhou (Alaric) works with lens-based media, sound, and installation. He explores the in-between of physical and conceptual landscapes. His works have been showcased at Antimatter, Mimesis, Interfilm, Experiments in Cinema, Non-Syntax, Leiden Shorts, RPM Festival, etc.