Paris programme
Wednesday 1st November 2023

La Reprise (Dérive) is an exercise in continuity and distortion. This experimental film began on June 20, 2020. As of September 3, 2023, it is 168 min / weeks long. Every week, a subsequent minute is produced by combining scenes shot that week with archival material from the past years. Footage and sound are consistently recorded with the same single device (an iPhone). The film may distort, but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is what was recorded. The sequences are neither true nor false, they integrate various degrees of theatricality and authenticity. They become portraits of an agitated immersion in the perpetual process of being, of this unpredictable yet systematic gathering and indexing. They are the record of close observations. I am a passenger, a witness to recurrences and patterns. This continuous collage of archives is the tension. The narrative is disconnected from the sum of its parts and elaborates on successes and failures. In this regard, the film is in a constant state of being finished, rather than interminably in progress. While its length progressively evolves, it also always is its final duration. This work is meant to continue until my death.

Fette Sans is based in Zagreb and in Berlin. She has a conceptual and interdisciplinary practice that includes the production of images, writing, performances, online gestures, film-making, discussions, and installations. Games of dissociative identities and the stories we tell ourselves to collect evidence of what has happened are recurring components in her work. She is interested in the ambiguity of what constitutes an image’s residue. Concerned with social systems, representation, and technology, she develops obsessive rituals, collaborations, and speculative narratives to question these issues. Rituals are interesting because there are ways of expressing repetition and the longing for security while accepting the risks associated with the very act of ceremonial reiterations: boredom itself.

A film about snow outside the window, tractors in convoys, children learning and breathing.

Magnus B. B. Lysbakken is a writer, director and cinematographer, working in the intersection between fiction, documentary. He started his career in the Danish film industry, where he made his screenwriting debut with the feature film «Lovers» in 2017, directed by Niels Kaa. In 2022 he graduated from the Norwegian Film School with a master’s degree in Directing Fiction, specializing in combining film production with social outreach. He also holds a BA in Film Science and a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Copenhagen. Magnus’ films explore the social dynamics of small communities, with a special emphasis on the interactions between children and adults.

Men and women shout, crowd, shake then embrace. Paul says goodbye to them. He leaves the institution with the hope, perhaps, of a new beginning, but outside, the past persists from one room to another.

Pierre Lefrançois Vérove was born in 1989 and lives in Montreuil, France. He studied at the national school of art of Paris-Cergy before joining Le Fresnoy, national studio of contemporary arts in 2021. His works, films and texts focus on the visible or invisible margins and those who inhabit them. A consideration that led him to explore the field of institutional psychotherapy (La chambre de Paul, 2022) or to follow European borders from Paris to the island of Lesbos in Greece (Algèbre, 2019).

A boy went to a town. He went to find his next life.

Lin Htet Aung is a 98 born self-learned filmmaker and time based media artist based in Myanmar. In his earlier days, he wrote avant-garde poems and published underground poetry books. He started making short films in 2017. In 2020, his experimental short film “Estate” won “Silver Screen Award – Best Director” in Southeast Asian Short Film Competition at 31st Singapore International Film Festival SGIFF (2020). In 2023, his latest short film won the Principi Award at Lago Film Fest (Italy). His short films have been selected at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Ruang Rantau Exhibition (United States), Ecological Futurisms (UK) and so on. He is interested in the concept of time, duration, history, archiving and projection.He explores all kinds of mediums, especially videos, photos, paintings and texts. He is always seeking the magic of changing details in his environment through time and composes them as dysfunctional stories in his artworks.

“ML CRSH” is a video work that was developed using a 3D gaming engine environment for self-driving vehicles. The AI algorithm was used to apply the database collection of photo materials and textures of Dresden to the 3D models, causing unpredictable digital artifacts. The initial video was inspired by the “Media Burn” 1975 performance organized by Ant Farm collective, where a customized Cadillac drove into a wall of flaming television sets. Translating it into today’s digital environment of “database logic” of new media objects and employment of AI, it features a montage of crashes of autonomous vehicles into digital replicas of art objects. The artwork turns its focus on the proliferation of database and AI technologies and disrupts its patterns with an iconoclastic gesture of a crash.

Anton Ginzburg is a New York–based artist and filmmaker who uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations into art’s capacity to penetrate layers of the past and reflect on the contemporary experience. Born in 1974 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Ginzburg received a classical arts education before immigrating to the United States in 1990. He earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design and MFA degree from Bard College (Milton Avery Graduate School). His art has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum, Lille3000, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Screenings included IFFR, NYFF/Projections, Ann Arbor, Go Shorts and Images/Toronto.

Three artificial intelligences frantically speak to one another. They appear to be alone on Earth. Humanity, maybe all multicellular life, has disappeared. Did they, the AIs, cause their extinction? The AIs can’t be certain. Their memories are malfunctioning; their trialogue is fragmented and circular. Digital images they were once tasked with analyzing accompany their voices. We see a flood of sports games, physics simulations, hardcore pornography, CCTV footage, feature films, military demos, home movies, television commercials. Like their artificial minds, time has eroded the images into incoherence. As images rush by, the AIs are by turns regretful, forgetful, psychotic, and philosophic. Once treated as secular oracles, they are now uncertain of past and future. The AIs come to realize that they may have predicted their own end, and intelligence itself might be a kind of catastrophe.

John Menick is an artist and writer who works with the moving image and digital media.

LAKE OF FIRE deals with religious filter bubbles in the social network Youtube and thematizes the fear of death and hell as a place of eternal damnation. Old and new iconographies of religious presenters are interwoven with pagan customs and the consequences of dualistic religions and anthropocentrism become visible.

NEOZOON is a female art collective founded 2009 in Berlin and Paris. Their work is based on the principle of collage and investigate sociological questions that deal with speciesism in the Anthropocene. In their video films, the de-and recontextualization of Found Footage / Youtube material is a recurring element. Amongst others NEOZOON´s work was exhibited at Centre Pompidou in Paris, at ZKM in Karlsruhe, at Kunstwerke Berlin and has been shown at national and international film festivals in Oberhausen, Rotterdam, Locarno and New York.

GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE looks at online subcultures premised on rapid technological acceleration and imperialist nostalgia, and their weird affinities with anti-rationalist ideas in the public sphere.

Mochu (b. India, 1983) works with video and text arranged as installations, lectures and publications. Techno-scientific fictions feature prominently in his practice, often overlapping with instances or figures drawn from art history and philosophy. Recent projects have explored cyberpunk nostalgia, corporate horror, mad geologies, psychedelic subcultures and Indian modernist painting. He is the author of the books Bezoar Delinqxenz (Edith-Russ-Haus / Sternberg Press, 2023), and Nervous Fossils: Syndromes of the Synthetic Nether (Reliable Copy / KNMA, 2022). His works have been exhibited at Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Home Works Forum, 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, 4th Kochi-Muziris Biennale and transmediale:BWPWAP.

La maison qui vous veut du bien La maison qui vous veut du bien est un film-essai sur l'histoire de la sonnette caméra de la société Ring rachetée par Amazon devenant en quelques années l'épicentre des objets connectées dits smart. Elle se voit envahie d'innombrables produits, éclairages, capteurs, caméras, aspirateurs, ours en peluche « intelligents » qui deviennent autant de témoins aux points de vue improbables. Des logiciels associés au réseau de surveillance des quartiers sont programmés pour analyser des comportements, ou encore des réseaux de neurones sont entraînés à reconnaître des visages captent, annotent, data minent, transforment la masse de données, filtrent par la détection biométrique assistée par du deep learning, en fonction de listes de gestes suspects, balancent leurs résultats aux officiers des polices publiques ou autres agences de sécurité... La capture sans autorisation du voisinage, l'espionnage organisé entre voisins et la disponibilité des vidéos privées pour les polices municipales font basculer le grand rêve de la maison automatisée en un cauchemar paranoïaque. Le moindre signe capté – vol d'un papillon, chien perdu, ombre d'un promeneur... – devient suspect, vient hanter les occupants de la petite maison blanche. Il se constitue progressivement un réseau d'espionnage privé en peer to peer. La bunkerisation des maisons entre dans sa phase «deep».

Stéphane Degoutin est artiste et chercheur. Ses thèmes de recherche portent sur l'humanité après l'homme, la ville après l'espace public, l'architecture après le plaisir. Ses projets enquêtent sur des situations d'ambivalence, entre la guerre et la danse, entre le plaisir sexuel et le non-lieu, entre la ville et son potentiel, entre le posthumain et l'obsolescence de l'homme. Il enseigne à l'École des Arts Décoratifs à Paris. Site internet : https://d-w.fr/ Gwenola Wagon est artiste et enseigne à l'université Paris 8 à Saint-Denis. Son travail imagine des alternatives et des récits paradoxaux pour déconstruire le monde numérique contemporain. Elle a réalisé des films et des installations pour des festivals et des expositions en France et à l'étranger. Elle a publié Psychanalyse de l'aéroport international avec Stéphane Degoutin, et le livre Planète B aux éditions 369. Site internet : https://d-w.fr/

A song about scavenging, economic exploitation and post-internet reality performed by a Georgian polyphonic choir and based on a story of Hayastan Shakarian - an elderly, illiterate woman from the village of Armazi near Mtskheta, who in 2011 allegedly cut the internet cable connecting Georgia and Armenia whilst looking for scrap metal to sell. The story became global news though Shakarian denied any involvement, famously saying she had never heard of the internet, and many people disputed its veracity. The lyrics were sung to the tune of Chakrulo, a medieval Georgian song about peasants preparing for armed rebellion against their feudal master. The song was sent into space in 1977 on Voyager 2.? Commissioned by Arts Territory for Myth exhibition, Artisterium Festival, Tbilisi (song), filmed at Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF and supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program (video).?

Alicja Rogalska's practice is research-led and focuses on social structures and the political subtext of the everyday; she mostly works in specific contexts making situations, performances, videos and installations in collaboration with other people to collectively search for emancipatory ideas for the future. She recently presented her work at National Gallery of Art (Vilnius, 2023), Scherben, Berlin Art Prize (2022, winner), Manifesta 14 (Prishtina, 2022), Temporary Gallery (Cologne, 2021-22), Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2020-21), OFF Biennale (Budapest, 2020-21), Art Encounters Biennale (Timis?oara, 2019), Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2019), Biennale Warszawa (2019), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw, 2019), Kyoto Art Centre (2019) and Muzeum Sztuki (?ódz?, 2019). Rogalska was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program (2020-21), and took part in residencies at City of Women Festival (Ljubljana, 2019), Stuart Hall Library (London, 2019), Paradise AIR (Matsudo, 2018), Museums Quartier (Vienna, 2018) and IASPIS (Stockholm, 2017), amongst others.

Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness is a creative research project by South African artists Russel Hlongwane, Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. In fabricating a fictional institute and its archive, the artists explore and imagine vernacular technological practices operating across the African continent. An intertextual conversation between the documentary and the poetic, the video operates as an in-house media assemblage created for the preservation of the institute’s activities and ideas. The project aims to foreground indigenous technological knowledge and to explore how science, technology and innovation are part of a long interlinked process of accumulative knowledge production which extends long into the past. The work builds on the field of technopolitical research to formulate a multi-scalar history and future of technological creativity. Positioning the triumphs and failures of the everyday in the future-oriented technoscientific, the work unfolds the idea of development as a historical process Africans shaped.

Russel Hlongwane works in the production and assembly of culture. His area of interest is in heritage, tradition and modernity in South Africa. He moves between art-making (installation and film) and curating. His performance work operates as a bridge to transmit his academic interest to a broader audience, while his writing practice moves between academia, policy and art journals. His most recent peer reviewed paper is titled ‘Transcendental Technologies, Mother Tongues and Space (2022). He works intentionally with language (isiZulu) as a way to mobilise ideas contained in supressed histories. His work, Ifu Elimnyama (The Dark Cloud) has featured in six exhibitions and won the Sharjah Film Platform Jury Award. He curated the Bristol based Cntrl Shift Network festival that featured filmic works from the global south confronting the relationship between technology and the continent. Lo-Def Film Factory (Francois Knoetze & Amy Louise Wilson) is a DIY art duo who work across archival research, dramaturgy and visual strategies with video art, collage, sculptural installation and virtual reality. The duo aims to create a space for storytelling through the democratization of filmmaking via video by and for underrepresented communities across Southern Africa. They run workshops and work with various communities, placing value on the transmission ideas and lived experience over high production values. Their VR experience and research project The Subterranean Imprint Archive explores the legacy of technologies used in the extraction of mineral resources in Central and Southern Africa. It has been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, University of African Futures (France), MUTEK Montreal and the Geneva International Film Festival. Amy and Francois have exhibited at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, The Centre Pompidou, The Dakar Biennale and the Akademie Der Kunste, Berlin.

Recorded at night with a humble camcorder over multiple excursions through indigenous and exotic flora, rhythmic observational studies chart real and imaginary wildernesses. Revisiting Thoreau’s Walden ideal, the sentimental appeal of taking an axe to the woods in white-settler colonies encounters postcolonial unease.

Gavin Hipkins (born 1968, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand) holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, the University of Auckland. His photography and moving image works interrogate how images create meaning through fragmentation and circulation. His work explores the nation state, particularly in colonised countries in an era of re-imagined communities and ideas of social and political utopia. His practice engages film as a cinematic art that blurs conventional genres of essay film, documentary and experimental narrative structures. Hipkins has exhibited widely in international exhibitions and film festivals including: CROSSROADS 2022, San Francisco Cinematheque (2022); Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland (2021); 25FPS Festival, Zagreb (2020); Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (2020); Videoex, Zurich (2019); The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); International Film Festival Rotterdam (2018, 2015); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2017, 2016); The Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Edinburgh Art Festival (2014); Armory Film, New York (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Austrian Museum of Applied Art and Contemporary Art (MAK), Vienna, (2011).

go slow, you’ll see better is a journey of contemplation and transitioning between opposing states (of being). Revealing a landscape interspersed with vibrant colours of magenta and pink, this represents a bridge between excitement and calmness, chaos, and order. The shift in saturation mirrors the ever-changing nature of emotions, experiences, and personal narratives. Driving by and shooting out the window, the landscape becomes blurred and unblurred, evoking the sense of in-betweenness, which can prompt the feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity, clarity, and vagueness. go slow, you’ll see better is everywhere and nowhere, collapsing both the temporal and the spatial.

Siyanda Marrengane is a Eswatini-born visual artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Kuba semkhatsini is a SiSwati phrase that can be translated as being caught in the middle of conflicting states of being, situations, conditions and more. Siyanda is interested in the notion of the in-between (kuba semkhatsini), a central component in her practice that encompasses personal and collective narratives and experiences. These are subsequently explored as ways of questioning, challenging and falsifying existing hegemonies. Unpacking and translating these through video, sound and installation, to create ambiguous spaces that are both imagined and real.

A tone-poem in blue and red by US artist and experimental filmmaker Ben Russell, Against Time is a visually staggering kind of cine diary, shot on various locations between 2019 and 2022. Trying to find a way through the fog of recent years, the piece plays with dissolving images, non-linear montage, modular synthesis, and a variety of looping techniques to reflect on how we experience time as a fragmented phenomenon. It results in hypnotic and beautiful experimental cinema that seems to mirror life in all of its interpersonal intricacies. (Rewire Festival 2023)

Ben Russell (1976) is an American artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. Russell was an exhibiting artist at documenta 14 (2017) and his work has been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art Chicago, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlinale, among others. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2010, Gijón 2017), and premiered his second and third feature films at the Locarno Film Festival (2013, 2017). Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), and Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017). He is currently based in Marseille, France.

Camels are whispering I & II is a 2-channel video installation by Ibrahim Quraishi, exploring change in human relations. Heart of the work are 2 videos of the artist with his mother, questioning that impactful relation of self-identification. Around it we hear voices of artists, activists & thinkers; people who dare to go against the grain. People who take an exceptional position & don’t vote with the majority in times of trauma, conflict or change. In a cross cultural, transgender, cross historical mix of pre-recorded statements, these outsiders are talking about why they felt change is needed. The public will be learning, sometimes laughing or crying from accounts of the participants who tell short stories no longer than 3 minutes. The selected voices of artists, philosophers, activists are: Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Marina Abramovic, Serge Latouche, Nawal Al Saadawi, Noam Chomsky, Yuval Noah Harari, Assia Djebar, Hanna Schygulla, Jessica Ekomane, Komi Togbonou, Seyran Ate?, Yara Mekawei a.o. This video installation was conceived together with the ecological architectural collective, RaumlaborBerlin, winners of 2021Golden Lion Venice Biennale for Architecture. Sound compositions are by Eunice Martins, Heidrun Schramm, Mike Ladd and mixed by composer Norscq. Videographer & animation by Alex Weiss.

The art of Ibrahim Quraishi focuses on change, inter-cultural resistance of our socio-political realities. The ”2017 List of 50 most exciting artists in Europe right now/ART NET Survey” stated: "Quraishi is a visual artist whose work encompasses various media such as video, film, analog photography, painting & performance installations. Quraishi is characterised by a nomadic existence & divides his time between several cities across Europe & the Middle East. He consciously explores the dynamics of migration and he engages in research, teaching & creative work simultaneously in various cities & spaces”. Quraishi recently launched a research group on integrated ecology & artistic practice in Lahore called “Electric Rickshaw” with The School of Moving Images in Teheran. He is currently a member of the Fine Arts Department at Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam. He was guest professor at Netherlands Film Academy Amsterdam 2014-2017 & he thought at Art University of Amsterdam between 2007-2014. He is in the midst of finishing his first feature film “Holy Mama.”. He is a regular cultural columnist for taz, die Tageszeitung DE & counterpunch US. In 2021-22 he was fellow of Stiftung Kunstfonds Germany. Most recently, Kino Arsenal Berlin screened the rough cut of his film “Baumchen Wechsel Dich”about multiple notions on migration, children & identity.

Through rituals of birth and death, the filmmaker and her family reconnect with their ancestral land in the Gobi Desert.

Udval Altangerel is a Mongolian filmmaker based between Ulaanbaatar and Los Angeles. In her work she explores the themes of personal and national histories, language, and (home)land. Her work has screened at Locarno Film Festival, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, and Tacoma Film Festival, where she received Honorable Mention for Best Documentary Short Film. She was selected to participate in Locarno Open Doors and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Udval received her MFA in Film Directing from California Institute of the Arts.

Halmang revolves around a group of eight women in their 70s and 80s. It is filmed by the coast of Jeju Island near a lava rock islet that used to serve as a shamanic shrine for the wind goddess Yongdeung Halmang. The women, who have worked and made a living together for most their lives as haenyeo sea divers, used to depart together for the sea from this very location. The title Halmang refers to this spiritual aspect as shamanic goddesses in Jeju are referred to as ‘halmang’ while also being the Jeju term for ‘grandmother’ and a respectful form of address for a woman. It was also from this area that Kaisen’s grandmother during her lifetime used to depart for the sea as a haenyeo sea diver. The film portrays the aging women’s lived experience, their community and spirituality connected to the sea, the wind and the island. Central to the work is its focus on the collective use and care for sochang; a white, long cotton cloth associated with female labor and a symbol of cycle of life and death and humans’ connection to the spirit world. The camera carefully registers their hands, gestures, and facial expressions as they meticulously tend to the fabric. As the piece unfolds, they start connecting the long rolls of sochang until it comes to form a large spiral enveloping the black lava rocks. The music is produced by Lior Suliman (also known as Dub Mentor) and is comprised of layers of on-site recordings, looped, interleaved and treated to create an immersive sound experience. It also features The Song of the Haenyeos by Gang Gyung Ja and Song of Haenyeo Preservation Association.

Jane Jin Kaisen is an artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Spanning the mediums of video installation, experimental film, photography, performance, and text, her work is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and long-term engagement with minoritarian communities. She is known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works through which past and present are brought into relation. Engaging topics such as memory, migration, borders, and translation, she activates the field where lived experience and embodied knowledge intersect with larger political histories. Kaisen is a recipient of is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022) and awarded Exhibition of the Year 2020 by International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale and has exhibited and screened her artworks and films in a wide range of contexts internationally.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi's film Into the Violet Belly is a striking work blending family lore, mythology, science fiction, and digital abstraction. The film captures the experimental collaboration between the artist and her mother, Thuyen Hoa, who survived a perilous sea journey while fleeing Vietnam after the end of the American War. The film oscillates seamlessly between multiple voices, visual registers, and timescales,—was it seven months or seven thousand years?—creating an image of multitudes: migrating bodies swimming in an infinite blue, depicted as both a massive digital swarm and tiny avatars.

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi is a Milky Way-based artist whose practice mutates in and out of film, sculpture, installation, performance, and interdisciplinary research. Her work explores the epistemological, aesthetic, and political possibilities of the moving image at the intersections of art and science, documentary and fiction, personal/prosthetic memory and individual/collective histories. Having studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule and Film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is currently pursuing PhD research in Film at the University of Westminster. Thuy-Han’s work has been presented in both the art and cinema context, including Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Atletika, Vilnius; Belvedere 21, Vienna; Centro di Musica Contemporanea di Milano, Milan; De Appel, Amsterdam; Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila; Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham; Sàn Art, Saigon; Villa Medici, Rome; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin; the 12th BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia; the 20th Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, Copenhagen; the 19th 25FPS International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Zagreb; the 60th New York Film Festival, New York; Rencontres Internationales, Paris; the 20th Reykjavík International Film Festival, Reykjavík; the 33rd Singapore International Film Festival, Singapore; among other spaces. She is working on her first feature-length film.

The collision and fusion between civilizations, the transformation of the geological landscape, the conflicts between human beings and natural forces – after thousands of years, they have been molded into specimens of human ambition in different times and displayed on the timeless wilderness. However, the heavy significance of their conflicts in their own time has been dissolved by the endless wilderness and become a simple landscape beaming their messages to the timeless vast. When the shadow of modern the signal tower passes over the beacon tower built two thousand years ago, the significance of conflicts in different times collapses at the same time. Indigenous ecological knowledge and modern civilization representing advanced productive forces coexist in the gaps of collapse. The sublime will to strive for arete blocked by giant building fortifications echoes over the desert as permanently and incoherently as the signal sent by the towers. The passion and ambition for conflict have not diminished but have become more and more intense. The exploration of the deep sea and space, obsession and fear of artificial intelligence, everyone’s determination to fight against everyone, trade war, economic war, energy war, technology war, information war, cold war thinking, clash of civilization, identity politic. Human society seems to be in an eternal state of conflict, a stasis. This series of images are three longitudinal slices of this stasis.

Bian Yunxiang, creative designer/media artist who does visuals in digital space, self-taught in visual communication, trained in postdigital storytelling, specialising in the vast in-between, working as a design technologist in luxury, practicing media art and critical design around the topic of digital geopolitics, lecturing at the Royal College of Art and China Academy of Art, exhibited works in London, Eindhoven, Athens, Dublin, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Bejing, Kaohsiung, completed commercial art commissions from Burberry, Harrods, Nike, BMW, and Arcteryx through the years. Currently based in Shanghai, previously in Hong Kong and London. In my practice, I use media technology to express concern about geopolitical-related topics and create poetic moving images in the context of post-colonialism and global civil war through the construction of digital geo-landscapes. This allows me to document and depict the diverse and complex ways in which people engage with extreme environments from a political philosophy perspective.

Le film consiste en un nombre de plans fixes basés sur une légende qui décrit un combat entre un géant et un serpent de vase ainsi que l’impact de leur combats sur la météorologie et le climat. Le film met en scène une maquette de ville et des plans qui montrent un paysage où développement urbain, industrie et météorologie sont le cadre qui accompagnent le récit. Le travail met l’accent sur les liens entre maquette et cinéma par la projection d’images sur le paysage à échelle réduite. Un des buts du film est de faire se croiser les genres cinématographiques du réalisme, du fantastique et du film noir par une succession de plans relatifs les uns aux autres et qui cependant peuvent revendiquer leur autonomie comme tableau. Le film pause comme principe l'idée de la cité comme enjeu et comme endroit du politique, là où on organise, où l’on négocie, ou pas. L'idée d'un conflit évité, imminent ou qui advient est aussi présent ici, à travers le décor qui accueille le récit de géants, héritiers des Kaÿju.

Bertrand Lamarche En ayant recours à des distorsions d'échelles spatiales ou temporelles, Bertrand Lamarche construit un ensemble d'hypothèses sculpturales à la fois extatiques et conceptuelles. Son travail s'appuie sur l'amplification et sur le potentiel spéculatif de figures qu'il convoque régulièrement dans ses travaux depuis près de 20 ans : les paysages urbains et industriels, la météorologie, les ombellifères géantes, les vortex ou les platines-vinyles.  Une grande part de son travail se caractérise par un désir de subjectivation et d'appropriation de ces différentes portions ou figures du réel. Par un travail de modélisation, l'artiste réinvestit ces figures, et développe un ensemble de propositions, parfois vertigineuses dans le sens où elles procèdent de boucles, qu'elles mettent en scènes des abîmes et procèdent d'une perte de repères spatio-temporels et de distorsions d'échelles. Né en 1966, Bertrand Lamarche vit et travaille à Paris. Il est représenté par la galerie Jérôme Poggi. Il est diplômé de La villa Arson, à Nice. Son travail a été montré dans divers musées et centres d’arts en France, aux USA, au Brésil et en Europe, depuis 1997. Il fait partie de collections privées ainsi que de collections publiques telles que le musée national d’Art moderne - Centre Pompidou (Paris), le FRAC Île-de-France, Les Abattoirs (Toulouse), le MAC VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine) ou le Musée départemental d’art contemporain (Rochechouart). En 2012, Bertrand Lamarche a été nominé pour le prix Marcel Duchamp. Son oeuvre faisait l’objet de deux importantes expositions, au FRAC Centre (Orléans) and au CCC (Tours). Une monographie, the plot, a été publiée récemment en 2018 avec La Maréchalerie-centre d’art contemporain ENSA V, et inclue des textes de Nathalie Leleu et de Ingrid Luquet-Gad.

February 2015, Vladimir Putin’s opponent, Boris Nemtsov, was assassinated not far from the Kremlin in Moscow. Images of pain and protest, texts by Pablo Neruda are an open call for reflection in the short film ‚Swordfish’. Today, sadly, these images take on an even more painful resonance. Against hatred, against war, let's keep yelling!

Eléonore de Montesquiou was born in Paris, she lives in Berlin and Tallinn. Her work revolves around the articulation between private and official histories, personal and national identities. It tackles the intricacies and ambiguities of living in the margins, based on her personal experience of up rootedness. Eléonore is primarily working with video, she tapes testimonies, creating prosthetic memories of repressed histories. In her documentary-informed works, her camera becomes the voice of these voiceless people. Her work is based on a documentary approach, translated in films, drawings and texts. In Estonia she is giving voice to the Russian community or asylum seekers from French speaking countries arriving in Estonia. The films follow the protagonists over time. „Traverses“, with shepherds in La Grave, in the Hautes Alpes, since 2011, or „Nagrane“ with women living on the Estonian-Russian border, since 2005.

- Why do you want to blow fireworks on a swamp? - Well, I want it to happen in reality. There was fireworks on the swamp, that's for sure. The intensity of what is happening is so high that the consciousness does not have time to deconstruct the image of this event. Once the smoke dissipates, we can talk about interpretation field. But this is not so important, because it consists only of versions of reality and their totality does not give us a complete picture. It is important to live directly in the experience, where absolute reality can be revealed.

Born in 1983 in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in Paris, France. In 2011 he graduated from the School of Contemporary Art "Free Workshops'' at MMOMA, Moscow. From 2011 to 2016, he co-founded and participated in the non-profit contemporary art site «It is not here», Moscow. In 2013 he won a competition to create a light installation "New Media Night" in Nikola-Lenivec, Russia. In 2013 he graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Moscow. In 2014 he became a finalist in the international competition "Center - Periphery", Italy. From 2016 to 2020, he was a member of the Elektrozavod gallery team, Moscow. In 2021, he received the Second prize of “Zverev Art Prize”, Moscow. In 2022 he received the Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition Solo Award, Denmark. In mid-2022 he became an artist in exile because of his stance against Russia's full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. He is a participant and curator of exhibitions in Russia, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Norway and Denmark. His current work includes graphics, sculpture, installations, performance and video. The works are in private collections and collections of the Luciano Benetton Foundation (Italy), the Sphere Foundation (Russia), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Russia) and Uppsala Art Museum (Sweden).

The video is an artist’s momentary personal reaction on the events of August 2022, which took place in Estonia, in Narva, Maria’s home town. Since the war in Ukraine escalated, the removal of Soviet monuments in Estonia became intensively debated topic followed by the government’s decision to demolish any Soviet attributes and monuments from the public spaces. The tank monument in Narva became a stumbling block between the views of different communities within the country. It has especially became symbolic and problematic because it stood right at the border with Russia, on a riverbank of Narva river, facing Estonia. In the final scene the artist stands on that riverbank facing Russia. As Kapajeva grew up on that border, she felt an urge to speak up about the situation with the monument. As the artist states, the video helped her not just to scream out everything what accumulated for the first half a year of the war, but, also, it helped her to regain meaningfulness in her own art practice that she lost since the full invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

Born in the Soviet Union, raised in an independent Estonia and educated in the UK, Maria Kapajeva has found herself in an involuntary position of ‘the other’ everywhere. A position, she has embraced and employs as datum in her artistic practice, leads her to explore a diverse spectrum of cultural identity and gender issues within historical and contemporary contexts. Being originally from a borderland region, border within postcolonial and post-Soviet geopolitical conditions becomes to be the core in her work. She uses various mediums, such as video, photography, textile and installations, to bring to the focus what is often left invisible or stays in peripheral vision. Kapajeva’s works exhibit internationally including some of the solo exhibitions at Estonian National Archive (2013), Estonian Museum of Art KUMU (2022), Finnish Museum of Photography (2021), Lithuanian Gallery of Photography (2020) and Tallinn Art Hall (2020). Her video works were screened at various venues and festivals including Art Viewer (2023, Spain), VAFT: Visual Art Festival (2020, Finland), Luminocity Video Art Festival (2018, Canada), Berlin Feminist Film Week (2017, Germany) and others. Her video work ‘Test Shooting’ received Runner-Up Award at FOKUS Video Art festival (2018, Denmark). Kapajeva is a member of Estonian Artists’ Association.

The End is unreadable titles created by a neural network and endlessly running on a black screen. The project is part of a series of works in which the authors experiment with symbols generated by StyleGAN and other networks. The artists train neural networks on letters of different alphabets, and the language they create is immersed in the context of familiar forms: manifestos, posters, and now titles. These projects continue the tradition of experiments in text and visual media started by Russian Futurists who used abstruse language in poetry (Alexei Kruchenykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, etc.) and Moscow Conceptualists with their interest in poetic experiences (Lev Rubinstein, Dmitry Prigov, Andrei Monastyrsky, etc.). In The End it is impossible to read the text created by the neural network, but the appearance of symbols, their sequence and general layout allow us to perceive a set of meaningless signs as the closing credits of a movie. It is important that in movies we rather recognize titles by their appearance than by their content. The credits are the final part of any movie, but usually no one reads them. The irony is that in The End project there are only credits, here they are a work in their own right, impossible to read. Nor is it possible to wait for it to end.

Andrey Rylov is a new media artist who works in a field of sound sculptures and installations using materials from hardware stores and DIY electronics. He performs with experimental music, creates video works using neural networks, as well. Andrey Rylov is a graduate of the New Media Laboratory, participant of multiple collective exhibitions and festivals: NUR festival (Kazan, 2021), Prepared Surroundings festival (Moscow, 2020 and 2021), Blazar fair (Moscow, 2021), Morpho festival (St. Petersburg, 2021), Adaf.gr (Greece, 2019), Ars Electronica (Austria, 2019), Pixels festival (Yekaterinburg, 2019). Maxim Mezentsev is a graphic designer, visual artist and VJ from Izhevsk, Russia. He works with interfaces, fonts, animation and makes video for experimental theater. He constantly collaborates with the Center for Contemporary Dramaturgy and Directing in Izhevsk, Russia. Maxim Mezentsev participated at the Pixels festival (Yekaterinburg, 2019), Intervals festival (Nizhny Novgorod, 2019 and 2021), Night of Light festival (Gatchina, 2019), Adaf (Athens, 2020), METAXIS festival (St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Yerevan, 2022).