Berlin 2022 Programme

"Mojana" is an associative re-imagining of a Colombian myth and traditional song. A mermaid-monster, who is desired and punished: the man-eating, seductive Mojana. Agressions against this free and rare spirit are justified by obsessive love and desire. The film denounces the naturalized violence against this mythical female creature and reappropiates her as a symbol of trans-feminine resilience. Kinematic bodies and animal-human hybrids. An absent body, which returns into representation. A history of dissident bodies who resist dying in a necropolitical system.

Simon(e) Jaikiriuma Paetau is a German-Colombian artist. Their artistic projects are located between film and performance, dealing with queer cultures and decoloniality. Simon(e) studied Media Art at the KHM Cologne and Film at the EICTV Cuba. Simon(e)’s films have premiered at Documenta14, Cannes Directors Fortnight, MoMA, Rotterdam and has been awarded the prize for Best Director at the International Cartagena Film Festival Colombia and won the first prize (MuVi Award) at kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, among others. Simon(e)’s performance works have premiered at Studio ? of Maxim Gorki Theater, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Hebbel am Ufer, as well as the 11th Berlin Biennale. Nadia Granados Using my body in combination with multi-media technologies, my artistic practice illuminates the relationships between the representation of state violence in mainstream media, institutionalized machismo, heterosexual pornography, and violence against women. My work is both performative and technological, both art and activism, and a mix of cabaret, public intervention, and video transmission. Five years ago I created La Fulminante, a character who invites her audience into the world of auto-representation and meta-pornography, using internet information strategies to condemn globalized society. La Fulminante dismantles the language used in the discourse of emancipation by bringing together in her body eroticism and social criticism. La Fulminante is a character inspired by sexually provocative stereotypes of Latin American women. She embodies erotic fantasies built by the mass media, using reggaeton and pornography. She uses her body as a tool to disseminate information, as an element of attraction to make visible alternative political strategies, a resistance against mass media and a struggle against imperialism. In 2015, I was awarded the 3rd Visual Arts Biennial Bogotá Prize Acquisition Award as well as a FONCA scholarship to create a political multimedia cabaret laboratory in Mexico. In 2013 I was selected for a Franklin Furnace Fund Award for the performance Your Car Is Clean, Your Conscience is Dirty, which I performed in New York City 2015. In 2013, I participated as an invited performer at the Hemispheric Institute’s annual meeting in Sao Paulo, and in 2012 I was invited to Canada for La Rencontre Internationale D’art Performance De Québec (RIAP), taking place throughout four cities in Canada. Additionally, my work has been presented in Canada?, Venezuela, Spain, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Germany, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru?, the United States, Mexico, Korea, Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Estonia, Italy, France, and Colombia.

"L’odeur des fauves en nous". L’oeuvre s’inscrit dans la démarche assurément poétique de Julie Chaffort qui imagine et fabrique des situations relevant de l’instant magique. Les ingrédients sont le vivant, le chant, la musique, la visibilisation de corps contraints à une trop grande discrétion. Au coeur de ces situations aussi fascinantes que troublantes, Julie Chaffort filme les relations qui existent entre les terrestres (l’ensemble des êtres vivants, sans hiérarchie), les éléments (eau, terre, air et feu), les voix, les sons et les musiques qui prolongent les corps. Le chant des oiseaux, la voix d’une humaine, la puissance d’une chorale, le râle du vent. Les animaux (humain.es compris.es) interagissent avec ferveur et tendresse avec les arbres, la neige, les rivières, les sols. Pensées comme des scènes refuges où les corps existent librement, exultent et s’expriment, les oeuvres réveillent des émotions et des sentiments profondément inscrits dans nos chairs terrestres : l’attention, l’inquiétude, l’écoute, l’amour, la perte, la sensibilité, l’absence, la jouissance, la vulnérabilité ou encore le réconfort. Un ensemble d’états qui nous attache les un.es aux autres et qui rythme les cycles d’une longue métamorphose commune aux êtres visibles et invisibles qui peuplent le vivant.

Pour Julie Chaffort, le cinéma est un médium dominant, naturel, qu’elle choisit très tôt de développer, à l’école des beaux-arts de Bordeaux où elle étudie, puis auprès de Roy Andersson qu’elle assiste, et de Werner Herzog dont elle suit le séminaire à sa Rogue Film School. Les vidéos de Julie Chaffort mirent le paysage, le toisent et le parcourent ; on y croise des hommes au destin tragique et des héros aussi beaux que les chants qui les accompagnent – peut être pour en donner la mesure. Les gestes accomplis sont tout à la fois drôles et absurdes, l’avenir toujours incertain et les paroles s’envolent, attrapées par les branches d’une forêt ou englouties dans les eaux d’un lac. Les récits s’écrivent entre les longs plans-séquence et se devinent dans les détails que la lenteur permet d’observer comme l’on admire une nature morte. L’artiste ouvre des univers parallèles, atemporels et insituables, où le monde se signale à nous par ses infimes déplacements et l’infinité de ses signaux – étrangement menaçants. En 2013, Julie Chaffort expose au Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de Vassivière, le film « Hot-Dog », moyen-métrage qu’elle y a réalisé la même année en résidence. L’année suivante, elle présente sa première exposition personnelle « Jour Blanc » au Centre Clark de Montréal, avec des installations vidéos et sonores créées in situ. En 2015 lors de sa résidence à Pollen à Monflanquin, elle réalise le moyen-métrage « La barque silencieuse » ; ce film, « aussi facétieux qu’émouvant, aussi déroutant que respectueux de tout ce qui s’offre à voir et à entendre » pour Jean-Pierre Rehm, est sélectionné en 2016 en compétition française et premier film au FID Marseille. Il est également projeté à la galerie Thaddaeus Ropac à Paris Pantin lors de l’exposition Jeune création 66ème édition et remporte deux prix indépendants, avec deux expositions à la clé, l’une pour la Progress Gallery, « Entre chiens et loups », et l’autre pour la galerie du Pavillon à Pantin, « Les cowboys », sélectionné également au FID 2017. Julie Chaffort remporte en 2015 le prix Bullukian et crée « Somnambules », une exposition personnelle présentée à la fondation. L’artiste a été lauréate du prix « Talents Contemporains » 2015 de la fondation François Schneider pour l’oeuvre « Montagnes Noires » et obtient la même année, le prix Mezzanine Sud et expose au Musée des Abattoirs de Toulouse. Le film « La barque silencieuse » entre en 2017 dans la collection du FRAC Aquitaine ainsi que la vidéo « Nostalgia » dans celle du FRAC Occitanie Toulouse. En 2018, Julie Chaffort est lauréate du prix Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète et obtient en 2019 la bourse de soutien à la création du CNAP pour l’élaboration de son projet vidéo « PRINTEMPS » dont une exposition monographie du même titre est présentée à l’ancien palais épiscopal des musées de Béziers avec le soutien de Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète en 2020. Son dernier film « Légendes » a fait partie de la compétition officielle française et la compétition CNAP du FIDMarseille 2020.

A human being (the artist himself) lies half-naked on a forest floor, facing the viewer while gently singing. On his body rests a throng of colorful moths whose fluttering wings generate a melody attuned to the song. With its prolonged visual intro and lyrical song, Hour of Moth (Etude no. II) takes the form of a music video where Mejdahl himself is both the singer and songwriter. The work is a love song to the angel of the night—the moth—but also a yearning and sensual hymn to all nature. Mejdahls claims the geometric patterns on moth wings to be hidden warning messages from nature itself, but humans struggle to comprehend them. Hour of Moth (Etude. no II) thus looks upon the current climate crisis in which the human race feel detatched from Nature, while still searching for hope in the dark. This video art piece was made for Mejdal’s solo exhibition Liljegrotten (Lillith Grotto) at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen (2021). The same year Hour of Moth (Etude no. II) was aqcuired by by The Museum of Contemporary Art (Museum for Samtidskunst), and The Danish Arts Foundation.

Copenhagen-based visual artist, filmmaker, and electronic music composer Kim Richard Adler Mejdahl was born in the Danish village Skælskør. With an educational background in fine arts Mejdahl has created a wide range of critically acclaimed artworks that interweave genres and media. In 2018 Mejdahl received The Jury’s Solo Award at Charlottenborg’s Spring Exhibition for his horror-musical documentary ODE - featuring the artist’s entire family that sing about their deceased abusive father. The movie was later aqcuired by The National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst). Mejdahl’s largest production consists of his debut arthouse feature DAYS OF AL from 2019 - an experimental horror film starring the artist’s cousin and puppy dachshund as leading actors. Both movies come with its own soundtrack released by the artist’s music alias Kim Kim. This summer Mejdahl will release Liljegrotten - a music album and Denmark’s largest collectively produced sound piece made entirely out of audience sound recordings generated at the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art.

Chameleon is an experimental visual album inspired by the radical queer feminist genre of the “Biomythography” which refers to Audre Lorde’s foundational work entitled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name published in 1982. It combines history, biography, and myth, and holds a literary perspective that serves as a guiding light for complex narrative storytelling rooted in a queer, Black self-defined, feminist imagination.

jaamil olawale kosoko, (they/them) of Yoruba and Natchez descent is an award winning filmmaker, movement artist, poet, and facilitator whose work in embodied poetics and performance has been presented internationally and is rooted in the intergenerational passage of Black feminist knowledge, queer theories of the body, and sacred rituals of intimacy & wellness as a means to craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care where/when/however possible. Their new book, Black Body Amnesia: Poems & Other Speech Acts was released in Feb. 2022. jaamil is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, PEW Fellowship in the Arts, Princeton Arts Fellowship, 2019 Red Bull Writing Fellowship, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellowship. Their works in poetry, curation, performance and education have taken them all around the world having performed and taught in over 21 countries on 5 continents including Morocco, South Africa, Germany, Finland, Sweden, UK, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and throughout the Americas. Of Nigerian and Finnish descent, Ima Iduozee is a choreographer, director, dancer and filmmaker based in Helsinki, Finland. His debut solo work, This is the Title, premiered in 2012 and went on to garner international acclaim, touring in 15 countries across Europe, North America and Asia. In 2015 the annual honorary prize of the Finnish Critics Association, Critics Spurs´, was given to Iduozee, as an acknowledgement for the best artistic breakthrough of the year. Earlier commissions include works for The Finnish National Theatre, Aalto International, Stockholm City Theatre, Helsinki City Theatre, Finnish National Opera and Helsinki International Film Festival. In 2016 Iduozee graduated from the Arts University of Helsinki (Theatre Academy).

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.

A bed-bound woman's year passes as a day: her time is no longer measured by the increments of a clock but by the quality of weather outside her window. Objects emerge and merge in the gloom; the woman dissolves and reforms. Her muteness, her glaucomas and her inactivity render things indeterminate. By naming objects, animal and phenomena we reduce and delineate them, and so separate ourselves from the world around us - she cannot do this.

Peter Treherne is a moving image artist working in the South East of England. His films explore the affects of the environment, particularly weather, on agricultural and creative labour. His work is distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Kinoscope, has been funded by Arts Council England, and has screened internationally at festivals and galleries including Festival ECRA, Whitechapel Gallery and London Institute of Contemporary Arts. Peter is also director of the Slow Film Festival, an organisation that shares moving image art with the British public in rural areas. The festival has collaborated on programmes with institutions including Close-Up Film Centre, MUBI and the British Council, and has screened work from artists including Ben Rivers, Kevin Jerome Everson, Babette Mangolte and James Benning. Peter also holds a master’s degree in Film Aesthetics from the University of Oxford.

Following the disappearance of a man in Scotland, his daughter recalls words chanted before nightfall.

From Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films. She is also the director of several short films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. She has just completed the direction of her first feature film This House. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.

From the diary of Christopher Columbus, October 15, 1492: "And deviated from the land by two lombard shots, there is in all these islands so much depth that one cannot reach it. These islands are very green and fertile and have very sweet airs, and there may be many things that I do not know, because I do not want to stop to go through many islands to find gold". They had only been on land for four days. The gold never existed. It is only possible to suppose the sweetness of the air. The islands are still green.

Felipe Esparza’s work creates dynamic links and tensions between film, visual arts and video creation. In his projects there is an interest in social content coexisting with an exploration of themes such as nature, the sacred, non-verbal communication, its symbolic derivations, and the relationship between image and time, image and history, and image and truth. He approaches the complex representation of these themes by developing visual narratives in which the contemporary visual imagination cohabits with archives and with local and universal cultural codes, to the point of creating pieces of metalanguage. He is currently focusing on rituals, focusing on themes such as post-colonial remains around the sacred and the raw material with which cities are built as a sensitive archaeological gesture. His videos and video installations have been shown in national art centers such as: MALI, Luis Miró Quesada, Lugar de la Memoria, Ministerio de Cultura (Lima), Festival de Lima Independiente, Festival Lima Alterna, and international ones such as: Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin - New Cinema and Contemporary Art, Guangzhou Image Triennial (China), Shangyuang Museum of Contemporary Art (Beijing), Videobrasil Festival (Sao Paulo), Cámara Municipal de Lisboa (Portugal), Los Angeles Film Forum, HANGAR Art Production Center (Madrid), Buenos Aires Video Art Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Uppsala, Molodist, Curtocircuíto, among others. Graduated from the Master of Mal de Foco at the Centro de la Imagen (Peru), Director at the Berlinale Talent Campus and selected artist at Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, France.

Au coeur de Saint-Désir l'Exil se trouve une piscine. Au coeur de la piscine se trouvent les corps nocifs. A côté de la piscine, ma maman vit ses derniers instants sous le soleil.

L'epoca geniale (The Age of Genius) is a film that enters a place where form is mixed with lyricism and the magic of body movements and gazes. The eyes are filled with wonder and reveal themselves as a metaphor for a society that wishes to become children again. The protagonists' exercises have nothing of realistic, but lean towards theatricality and imagination. The walls of this universal space thus become silent witnesses of these complicated gestures, of these endlessly repeated attempts to finally reach maturity.

Tommaso Donati (Lugano, 1988). His work combines a narrative approach with documentary cinema and is structured around the theme of marginality. His films have been presented at various national and international festivals. He currently lives and works in Lugano

The age-old dispute between the open and the closed kitchen solution have reached a dramatic climax where “The Separatists” face the “The Open Kitchen Radicals” in one final heated battle. From there the film also debates the existential properties of the bar, as in opposition to the conservative breakfast table, and attempt to explain differences in psychological temperament through people’s preferences of kitchen worktop. The End of Kitchen Politics is the second film of the umbrella project Ad Nauseam, a series of essayistic videoss portraying a society where doubt no longer exists. In this day and age, neurologists have discovered the center of consciousness, the open kitchen solution has been ruled mandatory by law, and every new parent follows the hand book How To Raise a Child obediently. While Christianity and Neo-atheism have merged to form The Faitheist Church, a universal understanding of all the rules of football have been reached. And yet, this society is permeated by a chaos so disruptive that it’s hard for people even to breathe. Through hyper stylized 3D animations and what they call “clear-cut narration”, video artist duo Tor-Finn Malum Fitje and Thomas Anthony Hill comment on the current paradigm of truth, and attempt to challenge the post-modern notion that all ways of looking at the world can be equally true.

Tor-Finn Malum Fitje (1989) was born in Porsgrunn and grew up in Bergen, Norway, where he first studied Film Production, specialising with a Bachelor’s degree in Directing. He went on to do a BFA at Konstfack, before earning his Master of Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, graduating in 2016. Currently based in Oslo, Malum Fitjes work comprises essayistic video and audio installations, as well as text-based art. He has screened his films at the Modern Museum in Stockholm, the Gallery of Photography in Oslo and is currently working on three new films called Ad Nauseam: National Treasures Explained, that will be exhibited at the opening of the new National Museum in Oslo. Thomas Anthony Hill (1989) born in Coffs Harbor, Australia, grew up in Bergen, Norway and has lived in Oslo since 2017. In 2014 he graduated with a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen and has since then worked as a film critic and translator. Together with Malum Fitje he has created the works Hyphenic (2018) and Ad Nauseam (2020), the latter currently being exhibited at Galleri Golsa in Oslo.

a.o.k is about the experience of making pop videos and pop music. Using only behind the scenes and B-roll footage altered with animations, it is a painting of the emotional experience behind and in front of the camera. It is as much about the content as it is about the making of it. The project revolves around a series of music videos created to original tracks but the end results are neither seen nor heard; what remains visible, however, are the sensations of the contributors during the production. It is a journey that cramps with discomfort at the beginning but opens up, softens and releases into something tender and compassionate. The result is relentless and unforgiving but it is an ode to the loving images we create of ourselves.

Christopher Tym (UK) is a Visual Artist based in Amsterdam. His practice includes Film-making, Animation and Audio-Visual Installations. He creates liminal spaces in moving image using unreliable framing, affective editing and by exploring the relationship between the camera and the body. He graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2012 and the Royal College of Art UK in 2017. He teaches Animation and tutors at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

In this speculative fiction, all the world’s photographs have suddenly turned into the objects they represent. The video “White Shadow” depicts a vertiginous architecture, so devastating that it created new uncontrollable borders and isolated people. Piles of selfies, cats, and meals are scattered everywhere. Text messages evoke a new society living with limitations and suffering from media saturation, sensory overload, and crushing ecological impact. A world where images have taken over, invading and transforming space. They become the only reality that is still visible, as the whole world is turning inwards.

The collectif_fact comprised Annelore Schneider and Claude Piguet. They live and work between London and Geneva. Their work investigates how narrative and cinematic codes can expand our relation to space and objects. Their research considers storytelling, editing and filming as a tool to speculate and critically reflect on the habits that condition our perception of reality. Their film frequently uses the spectator’s ability to construct stories from ruptured narrative fragments and their desire to be gripped and even deceived by images and stories. collectif_fact’s films have been shown internationally in art festivals and exhibitions, including Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva Centre Culturel Suisse Paris, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Lianzhou Foto Festival, Metropolis Art Center, Beijing, Fotomuseum Winterthur. They received numerous awards such as the Swiss Art Award and recently Grand Prix Culturel Migros, Swiss Art Council Pro Helvetia Production Grant and residency Art + Tech Space Studios, London.

What happens when you try to perform Shakespeare inside GTA Online, a game space notorious for its aggression and gratuitous violence? You might expect the other players in your server to respond with heavy weaponry, perhaps a mini SMG, or a compact grenade launcher. And indeed, this is often what happens. Yet occasionally you may come across someone who responds in an entirely unexpected manner. This work radically subverts and appropriates the notoriously violent world of GTA Online and reimagines it as a meditative space for live performance of Shakespeare. It challenges lazy assumptions about video games (that they are simply mindless entertainment or the nadir of violent youth culture) to reveal their inherent artistry and sophistication, and at the same time opens up the snobbish and elitist world of classical theatre to those who are excluded from it due to disability, financial concerns, geographical proximity or lack of familiarity with the theatrical ecosystem. By harnessing the technological capabilities and networked connectivity offered by contemporary video games, it also interrogates the concept of the audience: what it is, how it can be accessed, and how it can interact with live performance.

Sam Crane is an actor and video artist, critically acclaimed for his performances at the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, in The West End and on Broadway. He has collaborated with many of the most celebrated and influential theatre artists in the world including Mark Rylance, Katie Mitchell and Robert Icke in groundbreaking productions including Farinelli and The King, 1984 and ...some trace of her. In the guise of his alter ego Rustic Mascara, he attracted over 50 thousand views in two weeks to his radical attempts to perform Shakespeare inside GTA online and has had his films shown at contemporary art and film festivals worldwide (including London Short Film Festival, Slamdance and Athens Digital Arts Festival). He is also a prolific screen actor and has appeared in many the most loved and successful television shows of recent years including The Crown (Netflix), The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC), COBRA (Sky), Poldark (BBC), Endeavour (ITV) and Call The Midwife (BBC). He has recently been selected as one of six emerging artistic researchers for Zurich University of the Arts PEERS programme, and was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2022

When you question the very nature of your physical reality it becomes much easier to see the cracks in the system. Estuary charts the emotional landscape of a time in flux. Inspired by the proliferation of computer generated social media influencers and the growing desire to document and manipulate every square inch of our external and internal landscapes, the film considers the ramifications of a world where all aspects of life are curated and malleable. As time goes on all lines blur into vector dots.

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, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS Film Festival, Internationales Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Sheffield Doc/Fest, and Curtas Vila Do Conde among others.

A reconstructed assemblage of the opening title sequence from the feature film The Shining (1980) by Stanley Kubrick, “A View of Above” was shot in reverse perspective at the actual locations used in the feature film. The original viewpoint is now inverted, looking up, and back at the ominous "eye in the sky" which shadows the yellow Volkswagen as it winds its way up the American Rockies to the Overlook Hotel. The framing, movement, and pacing of the original, feature film sequence is replicated shot by shot in duration and in relationship to the sun and weather. The intent is to recreate the original, but from an altogether different perspective: the gaze defiantly flipped, the viewer is no longer a complicit voyeur of the hapless victim.

Michael Paulus is an interdisciplinary artist living in Portland, Oregon. USA Exploring potential connections between often disparate relationships, his video work often attempts to reveal the hidden, censored, or unassumed in culture, cartography, mechanisms and commonplace conventions. Films and videos have screened at the NW film festival, PDX film festival, various domestic and international film festival as well as the Taipai Biennial, Scope Basel, various gallery installations and recently as part of CORE, -the Nagasaki-Hanford project as part of an installation at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA in 2018

Skull Island is an ongoing series of lectures, films and installations that examine a hypothetical image environment as an introspective space that reflects the sociopolitical contexts of its audience. Using the fictional island from King Kong as an analogy, cultural and technological developments define a relative position from which the viewer can view and question their surroundings. Part III is structured around two artefacts found in the visual effects archive of Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek Museum of Film and Television. A cast of the skull of the original armature for the stop-motion model of King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) and a silicone mask constructed for Kevin Bacon’s computer-generated invisible character in Hollow Man (Paul Verhoeven, 2000) create a framework in which to discuss the surfaces and armatures or the skin and bones of moving images. The film examines the inherent hidden material and socio-political properties of moving images, the perpetuation of insidious ideological constructs in cinematic remakes or reboots, and traumas encapsulated in the sites and systems of moving image production.

Graham Kelly is a visual artist and filmmaker. His practice is situated in the interfaces between contemporary forms of images, physical bodies, and environments. By considering these interactions as engulfing and continuous states or effects, his work seeks to expose and dissect power structures that are cast, distorted or enforced within them. His works have been screened and exhibited in a number of international contexts that include: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kino der Kunst, EYE Filmmuseum, TENT, Transmission, NEST, Recontres Internationales, and LUX. He was a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015/16 and at AIR Berlin Alexanderplatz in 2018.

When I immigrated to Finland, I started facing a deep shock regarding the differences between the two cultures. Finding myself on the border between the two helped my practice but distracting for my selfdom, affecting my decisions and creating a fertile ground for confusion and turmoil. When the world slowed down during the pandemic, I decided to turn my lens and start investigating my identity and perspective. I exposed myself to all the possible ways to understand what had indeed gone wrong in the process of figuring out a third self that came to be me. Music was the best path to pursue this exploration, and I made six music videos where I sang and acted as the protagonist. Intermixed from many different songs, where many viewers will recall, the lyrics resonate with the contemplation of my meanings in my life. I work with the themes of identity, power, fear, clichés, slippages, and uncertainties in language by manipulating well-known pop song lyrics once used to express love, hope, and dreams. The rearrangement of these lyrics illustrates a harsh yet honest tool that represents what we hide or are afraid of making known.

Adel Abidin was born in Baghdad (1973) and currently resides between Helsinki and Amman. He received a B.A. in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (2000) and an M.F.A from the Academy of Fine Arts in Time and Space Art in Helsinki (2005). Since his representation of Finland at the Nordic Pavilion in the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), his work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide including: Van- haerents Art Collection, Brussels (2015), 56th Venice Biennale in the Iranian Pavilion (2015), The Glasstress-Goti- ka, 56th Venice Biennale, International Exhibition, Palazzo Franchetti (2015), 5th Guangzhou Triennial, The Guang- dong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2015), The Pera Museum, Istanbul (2015), Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada (2015), Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014), The Jerusa- lem Show VII, Jerusalem (2014), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2014), MACRO-Museum of Contempo- rary Art, Rome (2014), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2013-2012), 54th Venice Biennale, Iraq Pavilion (2011), 10th Sharjah Biennale, UAE (2011), MOCCA, Toronto (2011), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar (2010), 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (2010), MAP, Mobile Art Production, Stockholm, Sweden (2009), 11th Cairo Bienni- al, Cairo (2008), Screening at MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008), Art Paris, Grand Palais, Paris (2008), Espace Galley of Contemporary Art, Louis Vuitton, Paris (2008), The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (2008) and The 4th Gothenburg Biennale, Sweden (2007). He has been represented in galleries including: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, London (2013), with his well-recognized three channel video installation "Three Love Songs", Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Dubai (2013), with his suspended light based installation "Al-Warqaa" (Chosen as the image of the rising Arab art scene in Dubai by the New York Times), Anne De Villepoix Gallery, Paris (2011), with his six channel video installation "Their Dreams" and Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul (2011), with his well received video installation "Ping-Pong". Abidin's work continues to be well represented in both Private and public collections including those of the KIASMA- Musuem of Contemporary Art, The National Gal- lery, Helsinki: The National Gallery of Victoria, Mel- bourne, Australia: The Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE: Mathaf- Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar: EMMA- Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland: Nadour Private Collection: Kamel Lazaar Collection: The Barjeel Art Foundation, UAE: The Heino Art Foundation, Helsinki: Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman: HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, UAE: KOC foundation. Abidin has been selected for the Finland Prize for Arts in 2015, Received a Five Years Grant from The Art Council of Finland (2012-2017) and in 2011 He was a nominee for the Ars Fennica Prize in Finland. In (2015) the Artist has taught, gave talks and panel discus- sions, at various venues including the UNESCO- Improving Artistic Freedom In a Digital Age, Helsinki (2016), the Acade- my of Fine Arts in Helsinki: Lasalle- College of the Arts: TAIK- Alto University, Helsinki (2014), The Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver (2013), The Mosaic Rooms, Global Futures Forum, London (2013), Darat al Funun - The Khalid Shoman Foundation, Amman (2011), OSU- Oregon State University, USA (2010). Location One Gallery, New York (2010), The Academy of Arts, Baghdad (2001). Abidin has been a Subject in Art documentary about his art Practice in many Tv channels including BBC- culture channel, England (2011) and ARTE- cultural channel, France (2008). also his work was mentioned in major newspapers and magazines around the world including (The NewYork Times- 2011 & 2013), Le Monde, Le Figaro, the National in Dubai, Helsingin Sanomat, the Wallpaper magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Canvas Art Magazine, Art Forum, Art in America, Avek Media Art Magazine, Taide Lehti, ArtAsiaPacific…Etc

Inspirée par le poème féministe italien d’Amelia Rosselli, La Libellula (Panegirico della libertà) (1958), Cercate Ortensia est un film d’archives scientifiques, personnelles et de réseaux sociaux. Entre hommage et vengeance face à son héritage littéraire, le poème de Rosselli se nourrit de l’ambivalence de la figure d’Hortense du poème « H » d’Arthur Rimbaud, entre élan d'ouverture et retrait intime. Cercate Ortensia recrée un mouvement circulaire marquant une bouffée d’air libératrice face au passé et la vieillesse. Le film explore la chute, la disparition, l’oubli, l’évanescence, traçant un lien entre les recherches de pionniers scientifiques, la désorientation liée à la perte de mémoire d'un père vieillissant et malade, jusqu’à l’actualité brûlante de la catastrophe écologique. 

Pauline Julier est artiste et réalisatrice. Elle explore les liens que l'homme crée avec son environnement à travers des histoires, des rituels, des connaissances et des images. Ses films et installations sont composés d'éléments d'origines diverses (documentaire, théorique, fictionnel) pour restituer la complexité de notre rapport au monde. Ses installations et films ont été projetés dans des centres d'art contemporain, des institutions et des festivals du monde entier, notamment au Centre Pompidou (Paris), au Loop (Barcelone), à Visions du Réel (Nyon), au Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), au Musée d'art moderne de Tanzanie, au Geneva Art Center, au Palazzo Grassi (Venise), à New York, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, à la Cinémathèque de Toronto et au Pera Museum d'Istanbul. Julier a présenté une exposition personnelle au Centre Culturel Suisse à Paris (CCS) en 2017 et vient de recevoir le Prix fédéral d'art suisse en 2021. Son film « Naturales Historiae » vient d'être diffusé en ligne sur Vdrome.org et son prochain film, « Way Beyond », sélectionné en compétition à Visions du Réel 2021 sera dans les salles suisse à l’automne. Elle présente ce printemps une grande installation à l’institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne.

“Re-dit-en-un-in-learning” emphasises and concludes the linguistic training. This film has been co-produced with Van Abbemuseum, where echoes of this installation will occur (from 28 November 2020 to 25 April 2021) and is a sequel to Prouvost’s earlier foray into her unconventional lexicon from 2017, entitled DIT LEARN (using the French for speak, thus pronounced ‘de-learn’ in English), produced for Walker Art Centre, in which the viewer was verbally harangued and visually disoriented by a strobing collage of words and images, translations and slippages that destroyed the edifices of meaning, recognition, voicing and seeing. In that work we were urged to remember that a hammer means ‘no’ and a lizard means ‘yes’ – “this shoe means car,” continues Prouvost in her voiceover, “You cannot find the words for the images you see… All becomes one.” Upon leaving the Re-Learning center, the induction is over and the real-world examination begins, with the ideographic effects of the technique now translating object and signs into Prouvost’s language.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France and is currently based in Antwerp. In 2002, she received her BFA from Central St Martins, London and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Solo exhibitions have been held at venues including ‘AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON’, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2019) Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); BASS Museum, Miami (2018); They Are Waiting for You, Performance for stage at the McGuire Theatre, Minneapolis (2018); SALT Galata, Istanbul (2017); Kunstmuseum Luzern (2016); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2016); Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2016); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2016); Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2015); New Museum, New York (2014); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2014); Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Whitechapel Gallery, London and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia (2013); and The Hepworth Wakefield (2012). In 2011, Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013. Prouvost was selected to represent France at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

In meteorology, the aureole is an atmospheric, optical phenomenon; the visible inner disc of a corona, produced by the diffraction of light from the sun or the moon, bright starlight or planet-light. Aureole brings together unused celestial images from Scott’s earlier film, Diviner (2017), with vocoder-readings from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), scored by Chu-Li Shewring’s remix of the House track Brighter Days (1992) by Cajmere featuring Dajae. Aureole is a transition between a ‘lost’ chapter from Diviner and Wendy (2022, forthcoming), a film fan-letter to composer Wendy Carlos, whose many interests include solar eclipse photography. Accelerating to a euphoric end, the film is the duration of the longest total solar eclipse, when the moon completely covers the sun.

Frances Scott (b. 1981) is a London-based artist working with moving image. Her work considers the narratives and histories at the periphery of cinematic production and its apparatus, to produce films composed of their metonymic fragments. Her projects are often made in exchange with other specialists, groups and publics, and developed through research using online and physical archives and collections. She associates and composites diverse materials, analogue and digital film media, to create intricate scenarios that are both scripted and improvised. Her film work, informed by this collaborative and research-led process, takes multiple forms, through exhibitions to installations, screenings, events, broadcasts and publications, including recent presentations at: transmediale x CTM, Berlin; 57th New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center, New York; Edge of Frame & Close Up Film Centre, London; Het Bos, Antwerp; The Bower, London; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; Annely Juda Fine Art & The Russian Club, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Yorkshire Sculpture Park & Art Licks; South West Film & Television Archive, Plymouth; and Focal Point Gallery, Southend. Frances Scott was recipient of the Stuart Croft Foundation Moving Image Award (2017), and is currently working on a new film commissioned by TACO!, London for a solo exhibition and publication in 2022.

Full Moon. Inside. Perhaps not alone.

Born in 1974 in Portugal, Sandro Aguilar studied film at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema. In 1998, he founded the production company O Som e a Fúria. His films have won awards at festivals such as La Biennale di Venezia, Locarno FF, Gijón, Oberhausen,Vila do Conde, Indielisboa FF and have been shown in the most relevant film festivals worldwide. Two times nominated for the EFA – Best European Short Film Award. Retrospectives of his work have been programmed at Rotterdam IFF, BAFICI, New York Film Festival, Arsenal-Berlin and Oberhausen FF. In 2013, he was invited into the renowned DAAD Artist Residency, Berlin.

Through episodes that display a high degree of idiosyncrasy, we follow a stranger who creates an imaginary order which serves to stress his inexistence elsewhere. The film is a personal documentary that represents a constellation of past time and suspended time while attempting to explore the Foucauldian phrase 'a placeless place'.

Sibi Sekar was born on April 29th, 1997 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Sibi fell in love with cinema at an early age upon viewing the works of artists such as Luis Buñuel and Sergei Parajanov. Sibi began making experimental films and directed a few short films ("Thoughts Out Of Season", “Night Train Light On Track“, “Teal City” and "Representation") while doing his postgraduation in Humanities and Social Sciences. He launched the SSSW banner during the 2020 pandemic and made a few more short films ("On Floating Bodies", "The Tale of the Entry/Exit", "you are, i am" and "Of Other Spaces") under said banner. They have been screened at over thirty festivals across five continents. He usually works on explorative films that are primarily an ascetic representation of resistance and the thematic dispositions of his films concern the symbolic depiction of being, nothingness and the transcendental space.

‘The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.’ – Sohrab Hura The most recent film The Coast was filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a sea side village in South India where millions of people throng to participate in religious festivities to celebrate Kali, the mytholoigical Goddess of death and destruction, for a week every year. These devotees transform into mythical creatures, celestial beings and even characters from every day life and enter a frenzied state of trance in that celebration after which they are carried to the sea in a state of exhaustion to wash off those masquerades. This film stretches the end of the book and the photographic installation also titled The Coast (Large Gallery I). The margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture. In this sequel to The Head & The Bird (Large Gallery I), Hura uses the metaphor of the washing away of the masquerade as a hope for the removal of the different masks that society wears to commit and justify their actions. Many of his later works have looked at the mask as a metaphor to make social and political comments. Here he looks at the masks worn by society where as in Snow (Bel étage) the mask is his own - the mask of denial. In this film we begin with seeing groups of people going into the sea almost as if to conquer the waves that crash upon them. At the same time frenzied rituals are at play on land. A drone like hypnotic sound oscillates between the ears of the audience. During the festivities Hura had met a musician playing the Urumi – a traditional percussion drum in Tamil Nadu – whose skin heads are made of buffalo skin. To be able to listen to the sound of skin, the artist had asked if he could record the musician rubbing the drum stick against the taut skin instead of beating it. The tense fight with the sea eventually gives way to a more gentle embracing of the sea. In the film the sea holds hope of a more optimistic future – one that is led not by male protagonists. The continuous crashing of the waves on land makes the edges and tipping points more blurry making visible that the overlaps of land and water and other intersectionalities are always in flux. The sea asks for a different kind of osmosis and transformation, the sea asks for embracing and not colliding.

Sohrab Hura (b.1981) is a photographer and filmmaker. His work lies at the intersection of Film, Photographs, Sound and Text. By constantly experimenting with form and using a journal like approach, many of his works attempt to question a constantly shifting world and his own place within it. Some of his recent solo and group exhibitions include Spill (Huis Marseille voor Fotografie, 2021)The Coast (Liverpool Biennial 2021), Videonale (Kunstmuseum Bonn 2021, 2019), Spill (Experimenter, India 2020), Companion Pieces: New Photography (The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2020), Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan (Kettle’s Yard, 2019), The Levee: A photographer in the American South (Cincinnati Art Museum, 2019). His films have been widely shown in international film festivals. The Coast (2020) premiered at Berlinale 2021 while Bittersweet (2019) was awarded the Principal Prize of the International Jury at the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. The Lost Head & The Bird (2017) had previously won the NRW Award at the 64th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2018. Sohrab Hura has self-published five books under the imprint UGLY DOG. His book The Coast (2019) won The Aperture - Paris Photo PhotoBook of the Year Award 2019 and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! was shortlisted for the same award in 2018. The exhibition Growing Like A Tree (2021) opened in January 2021 at Ishara Art Foundation marking his inaugural curatorial project. The second iteration of this curated exhibition titled Static In The Air opened at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai over six slow transformations in September 2021. In 2022 Hura will be the focus of a profile at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for his films that lie at the intersection of the still and moving images. His work can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Ishara Art Foundation, Cincinnati Art Museum and other private and public collections. Hura lives and works in New Delhi, India.

Frankston is a study of the place I grew up, a satellite of Melbourne with affordable housing, nature-strips and beach views. The downright ordinary nature of the opportunities and festivities afforded by Frankston, and the ambivalence one can feel going back there, nonetheless give rise to a new aesthetic: the suburban symphony. In this case the symphony is rendered in strange hues and luminescences as though affirming Robin Boyd’s depiction of ‘the Australian ugliness’ in 1960, where he claims that “taste has become so dulled and calloused that anything which can startle a response on jaded retinas is deemed successful.”

Patrick Tarrant (Melbourne, 1969) is an Associate Professor in filmmaking at London South Bank University who has written on feature-length portrait films such as Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, Two Years At Sea and Manakamana. Patrick has made video portraits and observational city films, while developing a hybrid filmmaking method that brings digital video and a 16mm film projector together (in The Take-Up, The Trembling Giant & Another Self Portrait ). Patrick has had films screened at the Hong Kong, Cork and Melbourne International Film Festivals, and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2016 London Film Festival.

Choreographies of everyday life in a small town in Belarus. Through static images and associative montage, Telo Khana (Khan’s Flesh) conveys a perspective on society and the intangible power relations it is permeated by. The priest's ear recognizes the sins of the parishioners. The heartbeat of the fetus is monitored. Workers leaving factory. Telo Khana (Khan’s Flesh) shows the everyday life of a small town in Belarus as choreographies within stage-like images. The inhabitants move and position their bodies depending on the situation and according to their social and professional status. A skeleton of norms, rules and role models, completed with the bodies of active citizens, becomes a vital structure whose components alternatingly discipline themselves through mutual control, praise and punishment. These interwoven social structures are getting traced, broken up and recontextualized by a dance-like montage. The images strict tableau-style reveals a surreal theatricality of the institutionally shaped everyday life. At the same time Telo Khana (Khan’s Flesh) is a contemporary document of life in the Belarusian province, barely a year before the beginning of the nationwide protests against the state apparatus.

Kristina Savutsina was born in 1989 in Riga, into a Belarusian family. From 1993 to 2014 she lived in Belarus. She graduated with diploma in cultural studies in Minsk. In 2014 Kristina moved to Germany, where she has been studying film and fine arts at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK). In her work Kristina deals with regulatory politics and its concrete manifestations in Belarus. Besides artistic practice she works as curator and translator. She lives and works in Hamburg. Georg Kussmann was born in Halle/Saale, East Germany in 1989 and grew up there. He studied photography and film at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. Currently he lives in Berlin and works as an artist, filmmaker and cinematographer.