Berlin 2024 Programme

Super-8 flicker film shot and hand-developed in Seoul in spring 2022 with jazz soundtrack from a Jonas Mekas centennial tribute in Busan.

Pip Chodorov. Born April 13, 1965 in New York. Filmmaking and music composition since 1972. Studied cognitive science at the University of Rochester, NY and film semiotics at the University of Paris, France. Work in film distribution - previously Orion Classics, NYC; UGC, Paris; Light Cone, Paris; and, currently, Re:Voir Video, Paris, which he founded in 1994 and The Film Gallery, the first art gallery devoted excusively to experimental film. He is also co-founder of L'Abominable, a cooperative do-it-yourself film lab in Paris, and the moderator of the internet-based forum on experimental film, FrameWorks.

A film titled Dance Movie (aka Rollerskate) appears in many Warhol filmographies, but no work with this title can be found in the Collection. The lost film, starring dancer Fred Herko gliding on a single roller skate, was shot in 1963. Herko was a talented dancer and choreographer who cofounded and performed with the Judson Dance Theater. Herko was also associated with the Mole People, a group of queer men and women who came together to get high on speed and listen to opera. In October 1964, unhoused and strung out on drugs, Herko leapt out of an open window while dancing naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major. Although the current location of Dance Movie is unknown, accounts of it do exist, including Warhol’s evocative description in POPism of Herko “gliding in dance attitudes and looking as perfect as the ornament on the hood of a car.” Goddess of Speed poetically reimagines the missing film.

Frédéric Moffet is a media artist, educator, video editor, and cultural worker. He lives in Montreal and Chicago. His work explores the slippery territory between history, lived experience and fantasy. His projects include: Horsey, Fever Freaks, The Magic Hedge, Adresse Permanente, The Faithful, POSTFACE, Jean Genet in Chicago and Hard Fat.

Someone is sleeping. A conveyor belt moves stones in an underground place. The stones fall through a hole in the shape of a mouth. Some hands go through a piece of concrete. Someone operates a knob that crushes the stone. In CORE, we document the different states through which the material passes: stone, dust, liquid and solid. Moving between the surface of things and underneath them, we interweave two apparently distant processes: hands traversing and manipulating cement sculptures and the process of extracting and transforming stones in a quarry. An encounter and friction between materials that is in turn the result of the meeting and negotiation of two languages, the sculptural and the cinematographic.

JUNE BIO June Crespo (Pamplona 1982) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country in 2005 and participated in the De Ateliers residency programme (Amsterdam 2015-2017). Her solo exhibitions include: entre alguien y algo (2022) and Ser dos (2017) at CarrerasMugica gallery, Bilbao; Helmets (2020) at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz; Voy, sí (2020) Heinrich Ehrhardt gallery, Madrid and No Osso (2019) at Uma Certa Falta de Coêrencia, Oporto. She has recently participated in group exhibitions such as: The Milk of Dreams, Venice Biennale 2022; Fata Morgana, Jeu de Paume (Paris) or El sentido de la Escultura at the Miró Foundation (Barcelona). MADDI BIO Maddi Barber (Valle de Arce, 1988) has a degree in Audiovisual Communication and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her work has been shown at festivals such as Visions du Réel, FidMarseille, San Sebastian (Zabaltegi), Curtocircuito, Zinebi, Ji.hlava, Porto Post Doc and Las Palmas, among others. They have also been exhibited in museums and centres such as La Panera, Artium and the Oteiza Museum. She is currently working on the development of his first feature film, "Claros de bosque".

Dans Sirenes Opacas de São Paulo habite la tension entre la ville en tant que béton anonyme qui occupe l'espace, et le monde en tant qu'expérience accumulée dans le corps. Mais la ville est aussi le monde et l'espace est aussi le corps, et chacun porte l'anatomie de souvenirs opaques. L'ampleur des bâtiments face à l'échelle humaine des passants est opaque pour la recherche d'endroits sûrs face à la verticalité imposante. Le geste comme détail du corps qui parle est opaque au bruit de l'abîme urbain. Le suspense inerte qui gratte le ciel est opaque pour les expériences qui se transfigurent à la recherche d'elles-mêmes. Et cette tension ne grandit pas et ne diminue pas, elle est constante et ce qui soutient le mouvement quotidien, et son absence, dans les rues de São Paulo.

Né en Angola en 1989. Artiste transdisciplinaire, Lubanzadyo Mpemba s’exprime dans l’art vidéo, la photo performance, performance et documentaire. Son travail comprend des mises en scène visuelles qui traitent de la migration, de la la gentrification, la violence institutionnelle et la mémoire collective. Il est diplômé en droit et a étudié la sociologie urbaine, Études curatoriales, film et peinture en mouvement.

Fruit d’une collaboration entre la compagnie de danse contemporaine sénégalaise Diagn’art et les artistes belge et suisse Kita Bauchet et Stéphanie Pfister, « Les gestes de Saint-Louis » présente une esquisse subjective de la ville et du quotidien qui la rythme. Une infiltration chorégraphique de Saint-Louis à 2 danseurs et 2 caméras sur la musique de Siegfried Canto, qui met en lumière les énergies qui la font vibrer et célèbre la force créative de sa jeunesse.

Diplômée de l’INSAS, Kita Bauchet est une cinéaste belge. Après plusieurs courts métrages de fiction, elle réalise en 2009 La Fabrique de Panique, un long-métrage documentaire sur le film d’animation «Panique au village» de Vincent Patar et Stéphane Aubier, suivra en 2016 Une vie contre l’oubli sur l’œuvre du réalisateur André Dartevelle. En 2018, elle réalise Bains Publics, qui pousse les portes des « Bains du Centre » au cœur des Marolles, un quartier populaire de Bruxelles. Le film reçoit le prix France Télévisions du meilleur documentaire au Festival International de Films de Femmes à Créteil ainsi qu’au festival Brussels in Love, le Prix Birgit Wallborn de Docs en Goguette et une mention spéciale du jury au festival «Signes de vie à Clermont-Ferrand. En 2022, débute le parcours de « Les Gestes de Saint-Louis » mené en collaboration avec la compagnie de danse contemporaine Diagn’art, l’artiste suisse Stéphanie Pfister sur des musiques de Siegfried Canto.

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.

Février 2015, l’opposant au Kremlin, Boris Nemtsov est assassiné. Images de contestation et textes de Pablo Neruda sont un cri contre la haine. Aujourd'hui, ces fragments prennent une résonance encore plus douloureuse. Contre la guerre, continuons à crier !

Eléonore de Montesquiou est née à Paris, elle vit à Berlin et Tallinn. Son travail gravite autour de l'articulation entre histoires privées et officielles, identités personnelles et nationales. Il aborde les complexités et les ambiguïtés de la vie en marge, en se basant sur son expérience personnelle de l'enracinement. Eléonore travaille principalement la vidéo, elle enregistre des témoignages, crée des mémoires prothétiques d'histoires refoulées. Dans ses œuvres documentaires, sa caméra transmet la parole de ces personnes sans voix. Son travail est basé sur une approche documentaire, traduite en films, dessins et textes. En Estonie, elle donne la parole à la communauté russe ou aux demandeurs d'asile des pays francophones. Les films suivent ses protagonistes sur la durée. „Traverses“, avec les bergers de la Grave, dans les Hautes Alpes, depuis 2011, ou „Nagrane“ avec des femmes vivant à la frontière Estonie-Russie, depuis 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.

Kirill Savchenkov, born in 1987 in Moscow, currently lives and works in France. He works with various media including mediated sculpture, installation, performance, and sound. His artistic practice raises the questions of agency, identity and autocracy in the tech-social milieu. He was nominated to represent Russia in the national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennial in 2022 but withdrew from the project in protest over the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over the years, his works have been presented in institutions such as Transart Festival, Italy, 2022; 14th Baltic Triennial, Lithuania, 2021; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia, 2021; V-A-C Zattere, Italy, 2019; 12th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, 2018.

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).

During the darkest hours of the night a small disco light appears and shines lights to empty business premises. A minimalistic musical.

Jussi Eerola has worked as a cinematographer on many internationally awarded films since 1992. His directional debut was a documentary about electro-hypersensitive people titled Refugees of Technocracy (2009). The Return of the Atom directed together with Mika Taanila premiered at TIFF 2015 and won the NORDIC:DOX Award at CPH:DOX in 2015. Eerola’s first minimalistic short film Blue Honda Civic premiered at IFFR in 2020 and continued to many international festivals receiving three awards. Eerola is a founding member of the production company Testifilmi Oy started 2014 together with Mika Taanila and visual artist duo IC-98 (Patrik Söderlund and Visa Suonpää). Testifilmi emphasizes the vast potential of cinematic possibilities over standard formats and storytelling.

On being there is a filmic encounter with the material and outputs of the office of Tom dePaor, drawing on 30 years of practice. There is the place itself. There are notebooks, drawings, prints, scale models, 35mm slides, photographs, films, files, books, writing. A diversity of materials and media, evidencing significant technological changes in production and reproduction. This is the raw material. The film is a rerecording, or sampling of this material, where scale, media, and modes of presentation and realisation merge. The linear transition from drawing to model to built landscape and documentation is disrupted. The film explores the permeability of the image. Animated or activated through movement and operation, everything can be superimposed, overlaid, or cut into. An audio-visual encounter with place, within the space of the screen and the loudspeaker.

Peter Maybury is an Irish multidisciplinary artist. His practice-based research encompasses works as an artist, graphic designer, filmmaker, publisher, writer, editor, curator, musician, and educator. He is a graduate of Central Saint Martins, London, and is a Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research, TU Dublin. He has collaborated extensively with artists and institutions, editors and curators, on more than 200 art and architecture publications. Peter is a longstanding collaborator with Tom dePaor, making books, films, and works for exhibition. His film work includes Landfall (2020), an hour-long dual-screen film installation, and with dePaor the Gall films Drape (2018), and A Study (2015) made for exhibition at ETH Zurich. Peter is author of Make Ready (2015), and co-author with dePaor of Reservoir (2010) and Of (2012).

The process of making a playground is the starting point for a reflection on the relationship between work and free-time, highlighting the hidden labour of the production of culture by following the construction of Condorelli’s commission in South London. Jay Bernard wrote and recites the soundtrack.

Condorelli has produced an extensive body of work that develops different possibilities for living and working together, exploring notions such as public space, the commons, institutions, property relations. Condorelli’s practice is committed to a continuous exploration of the less explicit elements that compose the structures through which individuals encounter the world — be they cultural, economic, material, social or political – the apparatuses of visibility that are often taken for granted, and which the artist describes as “support structures”. Céline Condorelli lives and works between London and Lisbon. A selection of exhibitions and projects include: Pentimenti (The Corrections), National Gallery, London, UK (2023); After Work, Talbot Rice Gallery, South London Gallery, UK (2022); Our Silver City 2094, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2022); Dos años de vacaciones, TEA, Tenerife, Spain (2021); Deux ans de vacances, FRAC Lorraine – Metz, France (2020); Ground Control, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2020); Singapore Biennial, Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara, Romania (2019); Céline Condorelli, Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland (2019); Host / Vært, Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2019); Zanzibar (commissioned sculpture), King’s Cross Projects, London, UK (2019); Geometries, Locus Athens, Greece (2018); Anren Biennale, Chengdu, China (2018).
Ben Rivers studied Fine Art at Falmouth School of Art, initially in sculpture before moving into photography and super8 film. After his degree he taught himself 16mm filmmaking and hand-processing. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Often following and filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society, the raw film footage provides Rivers with a starting point for creating oblique narratives imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds. He is the recipient of numerous prizes including: FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; the Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, 2011; shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2010/2012; Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists, 2010. Recent exhibitions include: Slow Action, Hepworth Wakefield, 2012; Sack Barrow, Hayward Gallery, London, 2011; Slow Action, Matt’s Gallery, London and Gallery TPW, Toronto, 2011; A World Rattled of Habit, A Foundation, Liverpool, 2009. Artist-in-focus include Courtisane Festival; Pesaro International Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tirana Film Festival; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Indielisboa and Milan Film Festival. In 1996 he co-founded Brighton Cinematheque which he then co-programmed through to its demise in 2006 – renowned for screening a unique programme of film from its earliest days through to the latest artist’s film and video.

The Guilty Sleep, filmed during more than 75 overnight ride-along shifts with the police, illuminates urgent issues related to the current state of policing. It's a composed collage of raw, slow paced, and evocative imagery and sounds that frame polarities such as justice/injustice, observer/observed, confined/free, power/disempowered, and innocence/guilt. The video highlights the landscape behind these dualities and focuses on their complex relationship to one another.

Erik Levine was born in Los Angeles, California in 1960. He has exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, most recently at Ludwig Forum Aachen with a solo survey exhibition of his videos from the past 15 years. His work includes video, sculpture, and drawings, and is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Des Moines Art Center, among several others. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Pollock–Krasner Foundation awards. In addition, he’s received two grants each from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as grants from Awards in the Visual Arts, Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation.

Filmed on the former grounds of Black Mountain College, Looking Backward is a brief elegy to the legacy of a utopian college and other impossible projects.

Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator currently living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is the co-founder and programmer of Microlights Cinema, an artist-run microcinema which has been operating since 2013 and has hosted artists from around the world. Recently, his films have taken a lyrical approach to documenting the spaces and legacies of now-defunct experimental schools. Prior to that he made a series of introspective landscape films that engaged with Milwaukee’s progressive political past and contemporary anxieties about the future. Earlier films used abstraction to explore the tensions between perception and communication, with a reflexive attention on the medium itself. These films have been exhibited around the world at venues and festivals such as The Museum of Moving Image, European Media Arts Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, Media City Film Festival, Alchemy Film, and Slamdance. The films have received awards at Onion City Film Festival, Athens International Film & Video Festival, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Recently, Balcom was a fellow at the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee.

Nadir takes place at Norra Grängesbergsgatan, a kilometer-long street just outside central Malmö. A place of sometimes conflicting cultural and political interests, which was once considered a “no-go zone” by the municipality, as well as cultural gentrification zone, can perhaps be described as an expressive and symphonic micro-city. Surrounded by several small-scale industries, established in the 1930s, there is a lingering scent from the nearby Pågen bread-factory. Here, a Baptist church gathers upstairs of an old production facility side by side with flowing neon from Arab furniture stores and carpet stores. In Nadir, the narratives surrounding the street are reformulated as “anti-narrative” through a series of sensorial sequences through and on the street.

Amin Zouiten, is a Swedish-Moroccan artist and filmmaker educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Malmö and Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. His works and films have been shown at, among others, Malmö Konsthall, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Konsthall Charlottenborg, CPH:DOX, Tempo Documentary Festival.

Future Perfect Continuous is an invitation to meditate, to listen closely, and to consider the greater meaning of small gestures. In this work, Angelica Mesiti creates a crease in time and in memory, while offering an anchor to a transcendent idea of community. Future Perfect Continuous is based on a game usually taught to children in a classroom setting as a community building or drama-warm-up exercise. It involves a simple series hands gesture like rubbing, snapping, clapping, slapping that when repeated by the group generate a sound performance that convincingly mimics the sound of a rainstorm. For this video the ‘rain-storm’ activity is performed by a diverse group of young adults in their 20s, at the start of their adult life. 'We can imagine them leaving home and entering society, forming new communities'(1). ‘In my work I often explore the idea of the individual and the collective and how gesture and sound can be used to express a cultural experience or moment. I am interested in how this innocent game of imitating nature could also represent a turbulence that is part of the present. The performers become the weather’(2). 1 Kathleen Ritter 2 Angelica Mesiti

Angelica Mesiti is a multi-disciplinary artist based between Paris & Sydney. Her practice combines performance with video, sound and spatial installation to create immersive environments of absorption and contemplation. Mesiti has long been fascinated by performance: as a mode of storytelling and a means to express social ideas in physical form. In recent years she has been making videos that reveal how culture is manifested through non-linguistic forms of communication, and especially through vocabularies of sound and gesture.There is a focus in her work on the unquantifiable social role played by music — and, by extension, sound in general — in our relationship with the world. Mesiti’s work is regularly shown in museums and biennales internationally. Her work ASSEMBLY was the official Australian presentation at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).

A procession of non-conforming people – from musicians, artists and poets to anti-miliary activists, environmentalists and diasporic, queer and trans people – carry a coffin together through the ruins of what turns out to be an abandoned resort on the South Korean island of Jeju. It soon becomes clear that this is no traditional Confucian funeral. Age and gender roles are subverted, the coffin is draped in dark camouflage colours and the traditional portrait of the deceased is replaced by a black mirror. In the field between funeral ritual, political protest and carnival performance, the people in the procession who have come together to undo a world order built upon hierarchy and division, march through the ruins of capitalist modernity. Time and place begin to lose their stability as mythical Dokkaebi deities pass through the building and heavy rain and wind blow through its cavities. As if possessed the group, in a moment of revolutionary fervour, overthrows and dismantles the scaffolding of the prevailing order and other stories begin to take form. Jane Jin Kaisen’s interdisciplinary work not only activates Jeju’s violent history as a site of oppression and rebellion, but is a work with universal power.

Jane Jin Kaisen (born 1980 in Jeju Island, lives in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse 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. Through multi-year projects and collaborations, she has engaged topics such as transnational adoption, the Korean War and division, the Jeju April Third Massacre, and Cold War legacies. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, feminist re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Working from the thresholds of mediums and forms, disciplines and sensibilities, her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, thus contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence. Kaisen is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) alongside artists Hwayeon Nam and siren eun young jeong in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Kaisen has participated in the biennials of Liverpool, Gwangju, Anren, Jeju, among others. Recent solo exhibitions include Jane Jin Kaisen: Braiding and Mending at The Image Centre (2023), Of Specters or Returns at Le Bicolore (2023), Currents at Fotografisk Center (2023) Parallax Conjunctures at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021), Community of Parting at Art Sonje Center (2021) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2020). Other recent exhibitions and screenings: Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen, Tate Modern (2023), Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022), Checkpoint: Border view from Korea, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2022), Unmoored Adrift Ashore, Or Gallery Vancouver (2022). She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. Other exhibition and screening venues include: Kunsthal Aarhus, Nikolaj Contemporary Art Center, The National Museum of Photography (DK), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlinale, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Times Art Center, Museum Ludwig, Videonale (DE), Asian Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Gana Art New York, DePaul Art Museum (USA), ARKO Art Center, Seoul Museum of Art, Incheon Art Platform, Seoul New Media Art Festival, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, Asia Culture Center, Coreana Museum of Art, DMZ International Documentary Film Festival (KR), Silencio Club, Palais de Tokyo, Foundation Fiminco (FR), Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö Konsthall, Inter Arts Center, Kalmar Art Museum (SE), Sørlandet Art Museum and Oslo Kunstforening (NO), Finnish Museum of Photography (FN), ParaSite (HK), Kyoto Arts Center, Kyoto Museum of Art, Fukouka Museum of Art, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, (JP), Times Museum Guangzhou, Beijing 798 Art Zone (CN), Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival (TW), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (PH), The National Gallery (Indonesia), and Townhouse Gallery (EG).

Micki rides across the night through a palm forest. With the quiet and the loneliness, the repressed heartbreak pushes to the surface and Cassi becomes real. Like two homopolar magnets charged with their tangled traumas, they fail to find each other this time once again. But at dawn the wounds heal. Cassi disappears and the last video is deleted. But you can't force goodbyes, because feelings are real.

Gianna Scholten is a writer and filmmaker from Switzerland and Germany. She graduated from the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) in 2020 and continued her studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (khm). During her time at the khm, she dedicated herself to creating film projects and radio plays. Her work has been awarded the Prix Alice Guy Prize of the FID Marseille and the New Signs Award of the Film Fest Lago.

With no visible human presence, we move through the interior of a house. Like all houses, it contains spaces of darkness and corners hidden from view. That house, that interior, hides its flat background of ephemeral construction. We are inside a set built to the limits of the frame that films it. That house was only a fragment of what it appears to be. “The Uninvited” is a short film not about what there is, but about what there could be. Cinema is an apparatus of power over the representations shown therein and the bonds of continuity of a society. “The Uninvited” shows a house haunted by those absences, its blind spots and the violence of its limits and exclusion that its representations have meant.

Fabiola Torres-Alzaga is a Mexican artist working in contemporary art. She studied photography at “The active school of photography” and visual arts at “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City. She has been investigating focus and nearsightedness present in the act of gazing, and its repercussions in our socio-spatial relationships. I have a keen interest in cinema and its articulations of space and time, as well as stage magic and its defiance of logic. Both disciplines comprise the basis of my research. Through them, I seek to expand the scope of the visible, creating illusionary worlds that intrude into real space, counter-spaces that claim inclusive folds within the rigid limits of patriarchy to generate Other possible relations. Her work has been shows at MUAC (Mexico City, 2021), Lille3000 (France, 2019), the Biennal FEMSA (Zacatecas, 2018), the Anthology Film Archives (New York, 2018), the Biennal of Moving Images (Buenos Aires, 2018), the Paul Kasmin Gallery (New York, 2018), Videoex , Maison des Arts de Malakoff (France, 2016), the Polytechnic Museum of Moscow (Russia, 2015), MARCO (Monterrey, 2015), Museum of El Chopo (Mexico City, 2014), Museum of Modern Art (Mexico City, 2014), Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City, 2011), the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv, 2006) and Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros (Mexico City, 2004), among others. She has published “Historias de la noche” (Stories of the night, ESPAC, 2019) a book/project in dialogue with cinema curator Mara Fortes, and a solo catalogue “Fabiola Torres-Alzaga: In between acts” (Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2015), she´s currently a member of the Fonca’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores.

A stage unfolds and a love song is sung displaced from it’s owner. INSERT SONG is video-essay meditating on music and semiotics in relation to love, and how love declarations are falling victim to the image.

Kamil Dossar (b. 1988) is a Danish artist currently based in Copenhagen. Dossar’s practice is rooted in an interest in themes concerning identity and how we relate to images in contemporary society. Central to his work is the relationship between identity and the loss of it, and exploring the image in relation to the imageless, as a son to political refugees. By investigating visual identity and semiotics he renegotiates the status of the image by rearranging it into new modes of associations.

We listen to music and are on the way. In doing so, we see things and the world differently than before. So that things don't always go on like this, but may become better: Two boys meet on a train ride. Something is born – not much and yet everything. Enjoy a Golden Hour Carousel Ride. A Common Sensations Music Movie.

Nicolaas Schmidt lives and works as Filmmaker, Video- and Concept Artist in Hamburg, Europe. He studied Fine Arts, Time Based Media and Visual Communication (Film) at Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts. His works are shown at international film festivals, exhibitions and other contingencies.