Catalogue 2024

Media performance artist Dayna McLeod asked ChatGPT to write an increasingly snarky and heated dialogue between Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault about The Death of the Author, inspired by Barthes' famous essay. This script is performed by AI actors of the theorists, with Dayna’s AI doppelgänger, DaynAI, acting as host to their debate.

Dayna McLeod is a queer performance-based media artist. Her work often uses humour and capitalizes on exploiting the body’s social and material conditions. Her video and performance work have been presented at the Impakt Festival in Utrecht Netherlands, the Mardi Gras Festival in Darlinghurst Australia, MIX Brasil Festival Of Sexual Diversity in São Paulo Brazil, the Modern Art Museum in Warsaw Poland, Le Centre d’art contemporain in Paris, the PHI Centre, OFFTA, and Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montreal, the Summerworks Theatre Festival in Toronto, Sporobole in Sherbrooke, and Performatorium, Queer City Cinema’s performance festival in Regina. www.daynarama.com

In Spark From a Falling Star, an odd, unseen alien presence arrives, one that, beyond the usual fondness for abduction, transforms people into objects, public spaces to private real estate. At home in a world of windows and reflections, it floats unmoored through the real and virtual alike. While the world is devoured in its never-ending thirst for conquest, every zone becomes imprinted by the arrival. Where, finally, are you going to run?

Ross Meckfessel is an artist and filmmaker who works primarily in Super 8 and 16mm film. His films often emphasize materiality and poetic structures while depicting the condition of modern life through an exploration of apocalyptic obsession, contemporary ennui, and the technological landscape. His work has screened internationally and throughout the United States including in Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, and Curtas Vila Do Conde among others.

"Sinrise" (2023) is an experimental video by Danish artist Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl. Mejdahl stayed alone in BonBon-Land from sunset to sunrise to explore what happens when darkness descends in the old Danish theme park known for its grotesque characters. In the black interval we go on a cosmic rollercoaster ride among the stars while the cartoony inhabitants of the park seem to welcome the sun. "Sinrise" was recorded in infrared timelapse creating a haunted mood. The video suggests a way of portraying the sorrows of childhood nostalgia, and the eternal cycle of life and death.

Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl (b. 1989) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2019. Slaptstick humour and gothic horror meet up in Mejdahl's multifaceted work that often has its starting point in the artist's personal life story. Be it music album releases, film productions or large solo exhibition projects, Mejdahl's practice explore the topics of trauma-healing, climate crisis, spirituality, and gender identity. His video works have reached international audiences with screenings in France, Germany, Iceland, Norway, and South Korea. In 2018 Mejdahl received the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition Solo Award,, and in 2022 he was awarded a spot at The Danish Art Foundation's talent programme The Young Artistic Elite. In 2021 he recieved the Elna & C.T. Hollesen's Foundation Grant. Mejdahl's work is part of Denmark's National Gallery's collection.

“Excursion” was born out of my curiosity to explore from a distance a territory that has become dangerous not only for human life but also for life in general. I delved into a narrative that traces the natural and cultural history of the territories in Ukraine, particularly in the exclusion zone where the radioactivity caused by the Chernobyl accident continues to be active. The narrator of this narrative recalls the ontology of her own voice, creating a unique voice for each thing and giving a plurality of bodies to this discourse stemming from a single voice.

Pablo Mendez, born in Buenos Aires in 1988, is a contemporary artist, independent researcher, exhibition curator, teacher, lecturer, and translator. His artistic work has led him to become a resident at the Académie des Beaux Arts at La Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) for the period 2023-2024. In 2022, he participated in the latest edition of documenta (documenta fifteen) in collaboration with the Lumbung artist, La Intermundial Holobiente (Argentina). He has received grants from organizations such as the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Argentina), the Fondo Metropolitano de las Artes y de las Ciencias (Buenos Aires), Mecenazgos Culturales, CREA (Matadero, Madrid), the creation grant of the Biennial of Moving Image (BIM, Buenos Aires), among others. Pablo has been engaged in personal and collective projects since 2010. In 2015, he earned his diploma from the National School of Photography in Arles with honors for his research thesis. He has participated in various exhibitions, including the International Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles (Arles, 2015), Les Brasseurs Art Contemporain (Liège, 2015-2016), FRAC-PACA (Marseille, 2015-2016), Casa Nacional del Bicentenario (Buenos Aires, 2016), Stocq 72 (Brussels, 2016), University of San Martín Campus (Buenos Aires, 2019), Puertas Abiertas (Matadero, Madrid, 2021), Simbiología Prácticas artísticas en un planeta en emergencias (Centro Cultural Kirchner, Argentina, 2021-2022), Campamento Temporario (Investigaciones de Futuro, Buenos Aires, 2022), and documenta fifteen (Kassel, Germany, 2022), among others. His education should acknowledge several individuals who, regardless of their age, have worked alongside him, introducing him to new ways of thinking, collaborating, understanding, and feeling and growing as an artist and researcher. These individuals include Valeria González, Gonzalo Aguilar, Vinciane Despret, Dalila Puzzovio, and Claudia Fontes.

"Projection" is a video projected life-size onto a wall: the repeated projection of the artist's body against the white wall of his studio, like that of the White Cube. This video weaves a formal link with 70s performance artists such as Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman, except that it is a non-performative action, filmed and edited into a short film, in which both a representation of the image within the image and the metaphor of the artistic quest are played out.

Vincent Mesaros (b. 1969) is a French artist.

Silence is the period between two compositions in the space of shipbuilding heritage with an uncertain future. Due to the long-standing process of restructuring and privatization, political interventions and the governing structures' corrupting malfeasances, the workers of the 3. maj (3rd of May) shipyard stayed at home without pay for a full year, and the production facility went silent. That moment of silence in a facility that is usually filled with sound is the starting point for the portrayal of a specific space and time. Revealing the beauty of the spatial and auditory narratives of an industrial space, in the absence of workers and work processes, contextualizes the frightening socio-economic consequences of the “silence” and “emptiness” phenomena. After months-long negotiations in the fall of 2019, production continues with an uncertain future.

Toni Meštrovi?, graduated with a Graphic Arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he produced graphic arts, sculpture and installation. Due to his interest in electronic audiovisual media, he studied Video/Digital Imaging at the International Summer Academy for Contemporary Art in Salzburg, and completed postgraduate diploma in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. Since 1992, he has taken part in group and solo shows, as well as video/film festivals. He lives in Rijeka and Kaštela, and teaches at the Arts Academy in Split.

The Night Visitors is a movie about moths. In large and small fragments, looking both inward and out, through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely examines these underknown creatures. While The Night Visitors is interested in moths as organisms, with fascinating life histories, staggering biodiversity, and a functional importance as indicators of climate change and habitat degradation, its engagement with them is not primarily entomological. Instead, the film looks at moths as aesthetic beings and as carriers of meaning, aiming for a deep encounter with the beauty and incommensurability of the profoundly other. The small hours of the night are threaded through with a sense of mortality and loss. Moths, with their trembling and exquisite impermanence, provide both a kind of solace and, in their diversity and difference, a focal point around which the desire to know can be organized.

Michael Gitlin makes work about some of the intricate conceptual and ideological systems out of which ways of knowing the world can be constructed. His films have screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the London Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Gitlin’s experimental documentary, The Night Visitors, premiered at the 2023 New York Film Festival. His 2015 feature documentary, That Which Is Possible, screened at The Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, among other venues. His short film project, A Disaster Forever, was in the 2015 New York Film Festival. His 16mm film, The Birdpeople, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Gitlin was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. His work has also been supported by the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gitlin received an M.F.A. from Bard College. He teaches at Hunter College in New York City.

This film documents four delegated performances/castings, featuring participants who are both directly and indirectly actors of war: veterans, civilian victims, disabled individuals, or those traumatised by conflict. Applicants that have been seduced to participate in four castings of imaginary movie altogether agreeing to be part not only of an experimental film, but also of a subversive cinematic social experiment. They signed up for battle in the movie, and got an unexpectedly brutal lesson about conflict. They certainly, but so do we who watch it. With this poignant cinematic depiction of the personal and far-reaching impacts of war, this sobering antiwar movie project raises questions about the allure of violence and war that is so frequently simulated in the media surrounding Western culture. The encounter with real-life victims of violence forces a reckoning with their motivations and exposes viewers to the raw realities of trauma. The project emerges as an inexorable impasse, not for those who perish within it, but for those burdened by the enduring scars of trauma and violence. The Final Battle film coincide with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, both of which have come to normalize accelerated militarization and expanded conflict as a fact of everyday life. Both artistic and cinematic project attempts to contend with this deadly spiral of violence, which has a widespread psychological effect that prevents purposeful articulation and functions to undermine processes of reconciliation and social repair.

Born in Zenica, Yugoslavia in 1981, he completed secondary school in Doboj. After secondary school, he attended the Reserve Officers' School, where he attained the rank of sergeant. As a sergeant during his military service, he trained 30 soldiers. He enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Banja Luka in 2002 where he finished his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in painting. He holds PhD thesis in New Media at the University of Arts Belgrade. At the beginning of his art practice, he was included in the international selection of artists under 33, "Younger Than Jesus - Artist directory," by New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni. He has participated in various group shows, including the 55th Venice Biennale, 15th Busan Video Biennale, and the recent 13th Cairo Biennale. He has also held solo shows and projects at MUMOK in Vienna, Gallery MC in New York, ACB Gallery in Budapest, Antje Wachs Gallery in Berlin, Neue Galerie Graz, and others.

From the Vosges mountains in France, teenagers are discussing and exchanging ideas. The floor is shared: the ease of some, the courage of others, push them to speak, while others listen and observe. These roles, naturally performed, are at the heart of their conversations. Enjoying thirteen years of presence in this world, they tell us that sometimes "speaking says nothing." Two stories (one near, one far) of people their age whose words have been ignored intersect. They have spoken to try to make their realities exist, without finding an audience. When spoken words do not exist, bodies are subjected to violence (to themselves). « Treize années en présence » ("Thirteen years present") echoes adolescents whose perceptions are not devoid of accuracy or radicality. They express their visions of a fragmented world, where the artificial coexists with reality more than individuals do among themselves. They talk about the role that speech and listening play in it. If words can be actions, the silence that speech can confront also acts: it is the gesture of exclusion, of resignation.

Marianne Mispelaëre (b.1988) is a french visual artist. Her works are on display in France and abroad. She received the 2017 Grand Prix du Salon de Montrouge award.

From the Vosges mountains in France, teenagers are discussing and exchanging ideas. The floor is shared: the ease of some, the courage of others, push them to speak, while others listen and observe. These roles, performed "without thinking further", are at the heart of their conversations. Enjoying thirteen years of presence in this world, they tell us that sometimes "speaking says nothing." Two stories (one near, one far) of people their age whose words have been ignored intersect. They have spoken to try to make their realities exist, without finding an audience. If words can ‘be actions’, the silence with which words can be confronted also acts. The film offers a fragmentary narrative, generated from various conversations.

With drawing as her main practice, Marianne Mispelaëre produces and reproduces simple, precise and fleeting gestures, inspired by current and social events. What happens between us, within us, throughout the daily political challenge of living side by side? Her raw material comes from contact zones: encounters, interactions, transmissions, collaborations, borrowings, negotiations, confrontations. I listen to and observe social relations, language — what it does to its users, what the users do to it. She studyis the transformations and the structure of language to rethink its conventional forms. She moves and brings together bodies, languages, visual representations (images), other ways of saying, telling and thinking the close or distant world. Her work uses a variety of mediums : wall drawing, performative action, photographic image, video, film, text, typography, installation. They are often activated and interpretated, favouring in situ and ephemeral forms. Her work have been exhibit in France and Europe (Germany, Belgium, Romania...). It takes part of several public collections. https://www.mariannemispelaere.com

In Benin, the water people, who once fought against colonisation, are now facing water hyacinth, a colonising plant that reproduces at breakneck speed, suffocating the lake. Realism and imagination intertwine, as if one were only understandable or tolerable because of the other.

Italian and a graduate in Art Economics from Bocconi University, Marina Russo Villani trained in cinema and screenwriting in France, at the Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris Nanterre. A screenwriter and director of fiction and documentaries, she co-wrote ‘À qui le monde’ (To Whom Does the World Belong), a fantastical political fable that paints a fantastical and ironic portrait of how the world works. In parallel with her work as an author, she founded her production company, Filibusta, in 2023. Victor Missud's work takes a poetic interest in people marginalised from a territory and society, who become non-professional actors and actresses in his works. Blending documentary, fiction and genre cinema, his works have been presented and awarded prizes in France and abroad - Visions du Réel, IFF Rotterdam, Hors Pistes - Centre Pompidou, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Etats Généraux du Documentaire de Lussas. In 2024, he joined Le Fresnoy - National Studio of Contemporary Arts.

Six millennials meet renowned writer Noel Riccardi at a former workers' holiday settlement in the Italian Alps. Intrigued by the younger generation, Noel invites them for an evening of food, drinks, and debate. But as political disagreements arise, a generational clash ensues, leading Noel to respond with a cowardly act of violence. The following morning, another friend of the group arrives and joins Maria, who has developed an affinity for the aging intellectual. Together, they pay him a visit.

Magdalena Mitterhofer (1994, Italy) is a director and artist living in Berlin. In her site-specific, narrative works, she explores the relationships between surrounding architectural, socio-political structures and their inhabitants. Magdalena received a Master's degree in Fine Arts from the class of Hito Steyerl at the University of the Arts Berlin and studied New Media at Tama University in Tokyo. 2021 she co-founded the nomadic performance project "lament.tv". Her work was shown, amongst others, at Volksbühne Berlin, Julia Stoschek Foundation, KW Institute for contemporary art Berlin, Tanzquartier Vienna.

Observing reality with my camera. How can I put the memory of 9-11 into a context which is giving meaning tot he meaningless. What does it all mean after all? Memory, experience, feelings felt, countless impressions, perceptions. Aware and unaware, hidden and obviously on the surface. Tragedy, drama, upheaval, turmoil, change processed more or less into mind matter. Several approaches to the material of my archive containing meanwhile more than 800000 photo’s taken from 1985 until now. music: Michael Bonaventure: Prelude XI, Interlude XI, Postlude Xi Biography Thomas Mohr

Born in Mainz, Living and working in Amsterdam. Since the late 1980ties systematically exploring processes of perception and experience in installations and “films”. How do we proces what we see and encounter? Working with computer­ generated processes combined with manual execution based on a growing photo archive regarding to important moments of modern history as to major and minor personal events. Works are in various ways referring to conceptual and minimal art, to the history of early cinematography , the transformation of information, the evolution of (new) media. IFFR/Rotterdam, JMAF/Tokio, Sonic Acts/Amsterdam, Ars Electronica/LInz, IFFR/Rotterdam, Transmediale Berlin, IFF Japan, NeMaf/Seoul,mJMAF Tokio, SICAF/Seoul, IKFF/Hamburg ,Jihlava IDFF, HAFF/Utrecht, Media Art Biennale Wro/ Wroclaw, Underdox/Munich, Werkstattkino/ Les Recontres International/Paris/Berlin, Stedelijk Museum/Amsterdam, Edith­Russ­Haus for Media Art/Oldenburg, EMAF, Videomedeja, Berlin Atonal

A forest where animals seem to live in harmony. In the distance, a dialogue between a man and a woman. In the distance, a war is raging.

Muriel Montini studied cinema. She lives and works in Paris. Since 2000, she has made several films screened in different international important institutions (Musée du Jeu de Paume, Anthology Film Archives New York...) and festivals (Hamburg International Short Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Ji-hlava International film festival, European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck...). She currently works on different projects.

Here and Not is a new film by artist and choreographer Joe Moran that locates the viewer within a dance work. In a stripped back space, nine dancers navigate complex choreographic puzzles through continuous, relentless dancing, unsettling linearity and complicating subjectivities. The camera moves within the dancers and lingers on the periphery of three distinct choreographic phases that are intensified, destabilised and reconsidered through a split screen format. Reconfiguring choreography and proximity to the dancing body, the result is a challenging and refreshingly immediate encounter. First presented as a double-sided projection installation, the then 40-min looped work activated disrupted, multiple, partial viewings by necessitating spectators move around the work to view it. Here and Not is now reimagined as a new work, re-edited as a 15min single-screen film, to premiere in 2024. Here and Not incorporates an extract of Moran’s live work Thirst, wherein two performers navigate a complex, shifting terrain of power, submission, complicity and consent. In a single physical act, one moves from lying to standing to lying, mounted by the other who never touches the floor.

Joe Moran (born 1977) is a choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating touring theatre and gallery works, lecture-performance and curatorial projects. His work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought. Moran is Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation where he curated the Foundation’s two-year research programme Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got and its ongoing Dance Critical Theory Group. He is also a Dance4 Associate Artist, and Sadler’s Wells Summer University Artist (2015–18). Moran lives and works in London. Recent commissions and performances include Sadler's Wells (2019), The Lowry (2019), London Contemporary Dance School (2019), Wysing Arts Centre (2018), Bluecoat (2018) coinciding with the Liverpool Biennial, Kettle's Yard (2018), Sadler's Wells (2017). Moran contributed to the publication 'Who Cares? Dance in the Gallery & Museum' and 'Nothing About Us Without Us', a commissioned essay on artist advocacy published by Siobhan Davies Dance, November 2019.

Relying on oral and fragmentary histories, ‘I Am Also Part of the Three Turns’ traces the effects of a destructive earthquake in Bucharest and a concurrent flood it caused in a small town in Buzau, during a period of nationalistic urbanization in Communist Romania. In the capital, the destruction was seized as an opportunity by the authoritarian government to further raze large swaths of the city, invoking the earthquake as a mythological force in order to strategically replace rubble with new Soviet-bloc housing projects. Employing allegory as narrator, the film sketches a series of political congruences throughout a patchwork of intertwined landscapes, teasing out a temporally irresolute past that defies the linear cause-and-effect of both environmental disaster and authoritarian political repression.

monica maria moraru is a visual artist and filmmaker working between moving-image, sculpture, installation, and sound. Her multimedia work searches for cinematic referent across a wide range of materials. Across mediums, her work seeks to tease out entangled personal and political histories, searching for sensorial and cinematic resonances across a patchwork of temporal, relational and political histories.

Winter follows summer in a picturesque deserted garden, passed through by gardeners in integration dressed like road workers. Is contact with nature still able to stand against the disintegration of the social contract? The values of the Enlightenment and the spirit of Jean Jacques Rousseau seem to be surrounded by a modernity that is opposed to the possibility of harmony.

After studying history and philosophy, Delphine Moreau became passionate about creative documentaries, which she first explored through visual anthropology. In 2009, she won the Audience Award at the Premier Doc festival with La Société des Arbres as well as the Best Documentary Award at the Rencontres Cinéma Nature. She directed a series of short documentaries for France Télévisions, Saisons forestières. Then Marmites Khmères was selected in many international ethnographic festivals. With Les Gens du sucre, morceaux d'histoires, she won the Plume d'or at the L'ici et l'ailleurs festival. The film was selected in festivals such as FIGRA and by Images en Bibliothèques. In 2021, she co-directed (with Marie Famulicki and Corinne Sullivan) En Terrain Libre, a musical and documentary (award for best director at the Les sportives en lumière festival in Nice, selection at the FFIDH festival in Geneva, Les Écrans documentaire in Arcueil, FIPADOC in Biarritz, Docs au féminin in Rennes, Résistances festival in Foix...) With PARC, she questions our link to nature and to social and political utopias. At the same time, in a logic of shared creativity, she leads artistic education workshops that often give a voice to women.

Il Capovolto was filmed in a resort in northern Sardinia called Costa Paradiso. It was founded in the 1970s as an exclusive holiday resort for celebrities. Michelangelo Antonioni and actress Monica Vitti lived together in an iconic house nicknamed La Cupola, one of the first residents of the resort, a concrete dome designed by architect Dante Bini, now in a state of semi-ruin. The footage includes scenes from an abandoned Garibaldi military base on the small island of Caprera, in the archipelago of La Maddalena, also in northern Sardinia. The skewed and fragmented narration leads us through a fictional detour to a kind of ghostly figure inspired by the actress Monica Vitti, who lived in La Cupola during the filming of Il Deserto Rosso (1964). The video refers to this film by borrowing sounds from its famous sequence shot in Sardinia. That sequence gives us a glimpse of a utopia that the characters would have wished to achieve, but which by definition will never be. Il Capolto posits a pantheism where everything - the realised and the unrealisable - is connected holistically, or where everything can be seen upside down.

Anna Moreno is a visual artist working between Barcelona and The Hague. Her artistic practice is research-based and focuses on the unfinished nature of events, while questioning the processes of documentation during post-production. It encompasses concepts of finance, utopian architecture and speculative literature in the form of installations, films or events. Moreno has been in residence at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, (Maastricht, NL), Hangar (Barcelona), SASG (Seül), HIAP (Helsinki), Salzamt (Linz, AT) and Cittadellarte (Biella, IT). Her work has been exhibited internationally at Art Brussels, MOCAB (Belgrade), SAS Geumcheon (Seül), Fundació Joan Miró (Barcelona) and 1646 (La Haia), among others. She is co-founder of the Helicopter space in The Hague, where she has taught artistic research at the Royal Academy of Art and designed seminars internationally. She is currently a lecturer at BAU (Barcelona). Moreno has received support from Mondriaan Fonds, Stroom Den Haag, Fundació Botín, Ramón Llull, Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, among others.

“Here are some Images” is an short film exploring the interplay between internal and external images, using hand-processed 16mm footage and musings on perception and memory.

Yannick Mosimann is a filmmaker, sound artist, and photographer from Berne, Switzerland. He studied at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne, where he completed his Bachelor’s degree with the short film "How I Disappeared". The film has been screened at various film festivals worldwide. Mosimann further pursued his education by completing his Master’s degree in Contemporary Arts Practice at the Bern University of the Arts. Mosimann's body of work encompasses films, video/audio installations and collaborations with various artists as a filmmaker and musician. His artistic focus lies in intuitive processes, sensorial experiences and the reimagining of narratives. Themes explored in his work include the anthropocene, nature, cosmology, darkness and human perception. In early 2022, Mosimann released his first feature-length film titled "I Have Not Been Afraid of Going Blind for a Long Time". The film received widespread acclaim and was showcased at national and international film festivals as well as art spaces. Currently, Mosimann is distributing his feature-length documentary titled "Normal Love".

Casimiro Minier, former captain of the Congo tradition of Villa Mella and master craftsman of Congo musical instruments, serves as our connection to a legacy spanning 110 years. Through him, we delve into the knowledge passed down orally through generations, linking back to Mother Africa. Kongo for Kasimiro is a cinematic proposal capturing the Congo tradition in its everyday essence, celebrating life and the transition to death. Here, death is viewed as a passage to the life of the ancestors, whose presence is felt through the drum and spirituality. Kongo for Kasimiro also serves as an anthropological and ethnographic work from the perspective of director Boynayel Mota, who spent 20 years with Master Casimiro. This artistic material is aimed at educating and inspiring new generations.

Boynayel Mota is a Dominican filmmaker, musician, producer, and activist who focuses on the ancestral traditions of the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. His work primarily highlights Afro-indigenous communities, and he has collaborated with several prestigious institutions, including the Museum of the Dominican Man, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Smithsonian. Mota is also the founder of Yukayeke Taiguago Kiskeya, a space dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Taíno culture, which organizes the Anakaona Taíno Festival of Kiskeya

The reports by civilian victims of the Russian and Belarusian occupation in Ukraine contain descriptions of torture and repression that appear to be systematic in nature. Taking those reports as a basis, a filmmaker born in Belarus investigates that systematic procedure on the streets of his Berlin neighbourhood. He also confronts the question of what this war of annihilation has to do with him and what responsibility he himself bears.

Born in Minsk, Belarus in 1987, he grew up in and around Berlin from the age of ten. From 2009 to 2012, he studied philosophy and economics at the University of Bayreuth. In 2015, he took up a film directing degree with a focus on documentary at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf. His short documentary Handbook, about the protests in Belarus in August 2020, won numerous awards, including Best Short Film at the IDFA in 2021. Mozhar’s most recent work is a short documentary Unwanted Kinship about the Russian war of extermination in Ukraine.