Catalogue 2022

The sound work is a record of a student protest movement in Taiwan, but it is a mourning of the movement that no longer exists. The sounds in this work were recorded during the 2014 student movement demonstration in Taiwan. The overlap of sounds from near and far creates a state of physical closeness and alienation. I am talking about the body without remorse, immersed in this humid field full of body flakes flying around, to crash into the invisible system. We are in a state where we are in this dilemma of life, in this island, where we are not allowed to face our existence democratically and freely, where we are hidden in this darkness, where we are not seen and not known, where we actually have a will and a mind.

Born in 1978 Video Artist, Director, Photographer, Curator

A boy longing to become part of a motorcycling group leads us into a silver horizon, where through an array of moving images of dust, remote landscapes, and boys dressed in fragrant leather, we witness visual portrayals of what it means to feel ‘foreign’.

Vukan Žarkovic (1997, Serbia) is an up-and-coming filmmaker based in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Nicosia (Cyprus), and Belgrade (Serbia). He was born in Belgrade but grew up in Cyprus, where his inspiration and storytelling come from. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam with a B.F.A. in Audiovisual Arts. During his studies, he spent one semester in Jerusalem at the School of Visual Theatre. In 2022, he made the short film Aromana.

This film is about the nature of existence and memory. Seventy years ago, on a night, a musician was shot dead on stage in a nightclub in Shanghai, a story found by a Frenchman on an old newspaper today. Although the musician was long forgotten in the history,this French gentleman makes his way to Shanghai in the hope of finding the traces of the musician's existence. In a shabby old apartment, he reads aloud the novel written by Patrick Modiano, calling the spirits that used to live here.His voice evokes the response of the Shanghai musician. All of a sudden, it seems to him as if they share the same memories, details and breath. As Modiano puts it: "there was nothing to set us apart from the others, those Sundays in August.”

Zhou Hongbo graduated from Beijing Film Academy, with a master’s degree in 1999. His graduation film, A Fish Who Wants to Fly, was selected for Cannes Film Festival 2000, Cinefondation. Since then Zhou has made several features and documentaries which were screened at various international film festival.

Watch out for false artists. They come to you in artists' clothing, but inwardly they are lifeless algorithms.

Igor Štromajer – "le Pavarotti du HTML" (Libération) – researches tactical media art, intimate guerrilla, and traumatic low-tech communication strategies. He has shown his work at more than two hundred fifty exhibitions in more than sixty countries (transmediale, ISEA, EMAF, SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica Futurelab, V2_, IMPAKT, CYNETART, Manifesta, FILE, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Hamburg Kunsthalle, ARCO, Microwave, Banff Centre, Les Rencontres Internationales, The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale and in numerous other galleries and museums worldwide) and received a number of awards (in Frankfurt, Moscow, Hamburg, Dresden, Belfort, Madrid, Maribor, Podgorica). His projects form part of the permanent collections of the prestigious art institutions, among them Le Centre national d'art et de Culture Georges Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, France; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Computerfinearts – net and media art collection, New York, USA; Maribor Art Gallery, Maribor, Slovenia. As a guest artist he lectures at universities and contemporary art institutes.