Catalogue 2024

A man with no memory walks through the hall of honor of the former national congress of Chile, a place that was closed during the military dictatorship and that has become an important place again during the writing of the two new failed constitutions in Chile. In front of him is the famous painting of Pedro Subercaseaux that represents the discovery of Chile, this man without memory tries to remember our national anthem. Through this effort is built this film that seeks to make us travel inside an imaginary landscape in the heart of the History and architecture of the main hall of governmental power in Chile, where all presidents promised a fairer and better country ... this landscape is Chile : an experiment of neoliberalism that, despite everything, continues to breathe on our sky and dream

Enrique Ramírez was born in 1979 in Santiago de Chile. Since 2007, he lives and works between Paris (France) and Santiago (Chile). He studied popular music and cinema in Chile before joining the postgraduate master in contemporary art and new media of Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (Tourcoing, France). In 2014 he won the discovery price of Les Amis du Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. He has since exposed in some major places as Le Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton or le 104), France (le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire) and in Central and South America (Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico ; Museo de la memoria, Santiago ; Parque de la memoria en Argentina, Buenos Aires). In 2017, he is invited to the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia curated by Christine Macel, Ramírez is nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2020

Babel est une prise de vue par drone centrée sur la Ziggurat de Borsippa, qui a longtemps été considérée comme les vestiges de la Tour de Babel avant qu'un emplacement plus probable de l'édifice ne soit trouvé. Notre imagination a été nourrie par le récit de la Genèse, qui a popularisé cette construction aussi démesurée que l'orgueil du peuple qui l'a bâtie. Elle marquait l'incapacité de l'humanité à atteindre le ciel, malgré ses efforts pour construire un monument d'une élévation sans précédent. Et la situation contemporaine de Babylone, capitale cosmopolite d'un empire qui couvrait alors tout le Proche-Orient, illustrait bien la diversité des langues qui fut la conséquence de l'échec de la tentative. Dans la bande sonore, une composition de Romain Poirier et des extraits de la Genèse sont traduits et lus par deux programmes d'intelligence artificielle (DeepL et ElevenLabs), redéfinissant le lien permanent entre les tentatives de l'humanité de reconstruire - virtuellement cette fois - la Tour de Babel grâce à l'intelligence artificielle et au transhumanisme, et les erreurs sans cesse renouvelées de l'humanité.

The Middle East, countries that are not internationally recognized, radioactive or forbidden zones considered as “involuntary natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has traveled or inhabited. The artist, born in Paris in 1981, uses video and photography to present a silent, sometimes mystical image of these areas marked by past violence or agitated by major conflicts. These moving pictures composed of fixed shots, often long and devoid of human presence, tell of the impossibility of capturing these abandoned and transformed spaces, impregnated with beliefs and strewn with stigmata.

The Battle Over Mazepa conceptualises the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporizhian Sich and Left-bank Ukraine in the late-17th and early-18th century. Addressing codes of hip-hop culture, Ridnyi borrows the popular form of a rap battle to collide two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Mazeppa by Lord Byron in 1819 and Poltava by Alexander Pushkin in 1828–29. While Byron envisions Mazepa as a romantic hero, seized by love, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor in accordance with the colonial attitude of the Russian Empire. Highlighting the confrontation of these two texts, Ridnyi invited four rappers from different national and cultural backgrounds to write and perform their response to the poets’ lyrics.

Mykola Ridnyi (born in Kharkiv, Ukraine) is an artist, filmmaker and educator. He lives and works in Berlin where he holds a guest professorship in the Lensbased class at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). His works reflect social and political realities by drawing on the contrast between fragility and resilience of individual stories and collective histories. The body of his work created within the last decade address the question of how to talk about violence and war but not multiply its brutality in the visual language. Ridnyi's works has been shown internationally including the Schinkel pavilion, Transmediale and DAAD gallery in Berlin, Albertinum in Dresden, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, the 56-th Venice Biennale, The Kyiv Biennale and other venues and events.

A man wakes up in a nightmare where he finds his grandmother's favorite tree burning outside his window, and is haunted by whispers of his childhood. The text is adapted from a page in my notes app dedicated to things my younger sister says that I find strange, or sad, or hopeful. The images are from a recurring nightmare. This film was shot on 500 ft of 5219 Kodak 35mm film stock.

Dylan Rizzo is a filmmaker and photographer based in New York City. He is currently pursuing his MFA in directing at Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. His work draws from his experiences as a native New Yorker and Chinese - Italian American, often dissecting the meaning of memory and how reconciling the past informs the process of becoming. Last year he completed a 18 min short film titled “One Day I’ll Open My Fist”, shot on location in NYC’s Chinatown on 16mm film. It is currently being submitted to festivals.

A spring afternoon on the San Cristobal hill, in downtown Santiago de Chile. Four friends and a sound engineer talk about the events seen and experienced during the popular revolt that began in 2019 in Chile. The film brings to the surface certain conversations related to any revolution: hope, disillusionment, fire, torture and police violence. The name of the film comes from the poem April Noon by Eileen Myles.

Francisco Rodríguez Teare is a Chilean artist and filmmaker based in France with a moving image practice working predominantly with film, video and installation. Since 2015 he has been creating works and exhibiting them both in film festival circuits and contemporary art contexts. He has directed the shorts Appels téléphononiques, Una luna de hierro, Why are they equipped with eyes ?, Octubre al mediodía, El oro y el pez. The video installations and performances Gois, Colored Procession, This dream is mine and the hybrid feature film Otro sol. Recently his work has been presented at film festivals and museums as New Directors/New Films at MoMA, Toronto FIlm Festival, 62 New York Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Taipei Biennial, Stedelijk Museum, Cinémathèque Française, Mar del Plata IFF, CPH:DOX, Shanghai IFF, IndieLisboa, FID Marseille, Viennale.

A veiled metaphor for the instabilities of our times shot with a low-res Flip Camera

Peter Rose’s works in film, video, installation, and performance have received extensive national and international exhibition, including shows at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and more recently at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Rose is concerned with new forms of vision, improvisations in fictitious languages, and the pleasures of obscure journeys. The work is included in several major international collections.

Experimental video work in which the artist explores how art and culture become tools of military propaganda, working for the authorities. And how in modern Russia, they are trying to start a second wind of Soviet monumental propaganda, justifying and supporting the war in Ukraine. The film is built on alternating long, slow shots of Soviet architecture of the 30s. One place in Moscow is shown - the VDNH park, built by Stalin in the 30s as a utopia for the Soviet people, as a future city in which we were never destined to be. Here architecture is seen as monumental propaganda before World War II. The use of baroque elements, massive columns, and other details of unthinkable dimensions was supposed to inspire horror and a sense of the worthlessness of a person before the authorities. And that means complete submission.

Katherina Sadovsky (1985) is a Russian contemporary artist, now based in Yerevan, Armenia. Her diverse approach to art practice encompasses art media such as video, CGI, 3D, sculpture, photography, AI, installation, sound, site-specific practices.

A passage between two buildings, a nail salon, a stairwell, a badminton hall, an atrium, a hospital culvert. Life takes place. With the small details of existence in focus, rather than the larger narratives and conflicts, fragments are connected to a possible outcome. In mathematics, the word discrete is used to describe objects that are not continuous and separated from each other. Discrete mathematics is applied in a number of different areas such as encryption, databases, game theory, graph theory and algorithms.

Lucia Pagano and Vanja Sandell Billström were educated at the Lodz Film School and at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Discrete Mathematics is their second film as a duo which further explores methods developed in their previous film Park. Park was nominated to the Best Swedish Short at Göteborg Film Festival 2020, Tempo Short Award, 1KM Film Award, and winner of the Tempo Sound Award the same year. Previously they have shown their work at festivals and art venues around the world.

Tchétchénie, Grozny, printemps 2021. Les paysages de la ville sont remplis de portraits de Poutine, de Kadyrov père et de Kadyrov fils. Ils me surveillent de tous les coins, s’infiltrent dans mes pensées. C’est presque impossible à croire et à accepter. Je ressens le totalitarisme que ces portraits dégagent, les observant délibérément à travers un objectif déformé. Je filme les rues de ma ville natale, Grozny, depuis les vitres teintées d’une voiture, consciente que de tels actes m’exposent au risque de persécution. Je documente un moment où le fascisme commence à s’enraciner en Russie—un temps où, après trente ans de lutte du peuple tchétchène pour l’indépendance, l’accent est mis sur l’endoctrinement des enfants. En 2022, plus de 12 000 soldats de l’armée de Kadyrov sont envoyés en guerre en Ukraine.

Vladlena Sandu est née en Crimée, en Ukraine (URSS), en 1982 et a grandi à Grozny, en Tchétchénie, où elle est restée pendant quatre années de guerre. Elle est diplômée du VGIK en 2016 avec un diplôme en réalisation cinématographique. En 2019, elle a obtenu un diplôme de troisième cycle en art au VGIK, spécialisé en esthétique, et a publié plusieurs articles académiques. La même année, elle a également terminé sa formation en mise en scène théâtrale au Studio de Boris Yukhananov. Ses œuvres ont été présentées dans des festivals internationaux tels que le Festival du film de Rotterdam, la Berlinale, DocLisboa, GoEast, Movies That Matter, ZagrebDox, le Festival international du film de Genève, DOK Leipzig, et bien d’autres, remportant des prix internationaux. Au début de la guerre de la Russie contre l’Ukraine, en mars 2022, Sandu a fui la Russie et s’est installée à Amsterdam. Là, elle a réalisé No Nation Without Culture, un film sur le régime en Tchétchénie, qui a remporté le prix du Meilleur court-métrage au GoEast IFF 2023. En 2023, elle a également mis en scène la performance autobiographique The Rainbow Cinema et a reçu le prix du Meilleur spectacle d’Amsterdam Fringe 2023.

What waves and signals run through the hybrid landscapes between agricultural use and fallow land? Who passes through them? Working, traversing, and intervening in the landscape and space meet the atmosphere, the wind, the earth. Posthuman modes of production encounter magnetism and visions of Afrofuturism. The settings of the film include a field in the Lower Rhine region, outer space, a forest in Bad Marienberg, and a research site for migratory birds. Generated voices quoting texts by feminist science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin, theorist Mark Fisher, artist Lygia Clark, and interviews with foresters and bird researchers form the soundtrack together with music by Dominik Eulberg, Manuela Schininà, Maya Shenfeld, and Tim Tetzner.

Sandra Schäfer’s artistic practice deals with the production of urban, rural and geopolitical space, history, and visual politics. Often her works are based on researches, in which she is concerned with the margins, gaps and discontinuities of our perception of history, political struggles, urban, rural and geopolitical spaces. Her works were exhibited at 66th and 67th Berlinale (Forum Expanded), Berlin; at Camera Austria, Graz; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; mumok, Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Depo, Istanbul; La Virreina, Barcelona; Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe. In 2018, she completed her doctorate focusing on militant visual and spatial politics at HFBK University of Fine Arts Hamburg. Schäfer also is professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and an associated member of the feminist film distributor Cinenova in London. Schäfer’s practice involves curating film and lecture programmes. In 2003, for example, she curated the film festival Kabul/ Tehran 1979ff: Film Landscapes, Cities under Stress and Migration at the Volksbühne Berlin and the Filmkunsthaus Babylon together with Jochen Becker and Madeleine Bernstorff.

Mercury Black Magic is a meditation on being young and restless. A young man transfers his grief into the reconstruction of a 1980’s muscle car. His description of this restoration parallels the coming to terms with the emotions related to the loss of his father. This piece follows him through the landscape in which he and his friends hangout, together. This work is created amongst the young people of Salina, Kansas. They were hanging out at lookouts, parking spaces, and park shelters, doing seemingly nothing, but to them (and me) everything: listening to music, gossiping, relaxing, being. These moments are often described as nothing or as boredom or as inconsequential, but these are the moments with the most potential. Maybe these instances will not be recounted or thought of as memorable but, to me these moments feel the most intense. Before there is time for reflection these times are over, exhausted without ceremony. This is less a full understanding of a place, but my impression, a trace of a series of moments or an attempt to understand the world. This is an attempt to make something with the participation of the young people I met in Salina.

Justin Schmitz is and photographer and video artist working outside of Chicago, Il USA. He completed his Master of Fine from Yale University in 2013. He is the recipient of the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, The Tierney Fellowship, City of Chicago CAAP Grant, Albert P. Weisman Scholarship, and The Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Scholarship. A collection of his work is part of the Mid-West Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He was runner-up for the Photography Book Now Prize, and a finalist for the Honickman First Book Prize.

Cette fiction, tournée à Carnac en Bretagne, montre un monde où un groupe d’appareils électroménagers ont acquis, ou sont possédés, par une série d’affects. Ensemble, ils mettent en scène une version d’un drame victorien, une adaptation très libre de Jane Eyre de Charlotte Bronte, où un climatiseur nommé AC subit les aventures d’un pauvre et d’un orphelin dans un monde sans amour en plein changement climatique.

Liv Schulman est née en 1985. Elle a grandi à Buenos Aires et vit à Paris. Les vidéos de Liv Schulman sont inspirées de séries télévisées. Assumant les contradictions des différentes formes de résistance politique et « la frustration d'un potentiel révolutionnaire bridé », ses personnages « tendent à construire des thèses autodestructrices et deviennent ce qu'ils semblent critiquer », dans des monologues à la fois logiques, psychotiques et sarcastiques. Après des études à l'École nationale supérieure d'arts de Cergy, elle s'est formée à la Goldsmiths University de Londres et au post-diplôme des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Son travail a notamment été présenté au CRAC Alsace, au Bemis Art Center, à la Fondation Ricard, à la Biennale de Rennes (commissariat François Piron) ou à la Galerie, Centre d'art contemporain, à Noisy-le-Sec (commissariat Vanessa Desclaux & Emilie Renard), au SixtyEight Art Institute à Copenhague (« The Obstruction », commissariat Céline Kopp). En 2019, le Prix de la Fondation Ricard lui est décerné à l'occasion de l'exposition « Le Vingtième Prix de la Fondation d'entreprise Ricard », conçue par Neil Beloufa, et elle bénéficie également d'une exposition personnelle à la Villa Vassilieff. En 2022, Liv Schulman est résidente à la Villa Médicis à Rome. En 2023, elle présente une exposition personnelle au FRAC Bretagne intitulée « Adidas, Jennifer, Ariel, Woolite, le Chat, la Croix, le Temps, la Sangsue, les Problèmes, la Transformation, l'Ennui ». En 2024, Liv Schulman est artiste en résidence à la Fondation Fiminco à Romainville et présentera une nouvelle exposition à la galerie anne barrault en octobre 2024.

Filmmaker Alex Schuurbiers became captivated by a small house on a French island, a mystical place hidden between the incessant force of wind and waves. In the experimental documentary Song Of Homecoming, she talks to the house and its inhabitant in an attempt to find kinship and connection.

Alex Schuurbiers (she/her) is a photographer and filmmaker from the Netherlands living and working in Antwerp, Belgium. After years of writing short stories and shooting portraits, she started combining text with moving images for the short film En Vagues, which premiered at Courtisane, Gent in 2023. Inspired by the work of Jean Epstein, it was shot on 8mm on Ouessant, a small rocky island off the coast of Brittany. She created the miniature Handwerk at LABOBXL filmed on a Bolex, hand-developed and edited on a Steenbeck, after which she fell even more in love with the medium. In early 2023 she finished Where I lay my head to rest, a personal cine-essay about modern day femininity and close collaboration with cinematographer Ans Mertens. Song of Homecoming is her first foray into more documentary-based experimental filmmaking. She is also the founding member of Ursula, a collective of women working with the moving image based in Antwerp.

Tanja speaks English and small talk. Thorsten likes to eat „pocket coffee“ Tillmann loves team building events. He recently found one of the three door openers needed to escape from the chamber of horrors while visiting an „escape room“ together. Thorsten is „top tax rate“ Tanja is „Veganuary“ Tillmann is the first to be dismissed. Seedless Fruits is about the founding of a new company whose product or service remains unknown. We glide through an imposing company headquarters that gradually becomes more and more cracked. It is a satirical commentary on the abysses of neoliberal office worlds and alienated labour in a self-perpetuating construct of value creation ­without content.

Stefanie Schwarzwimmer (*1990 in Linz) is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Berlin. From 2012 to 2018, she studied art and digital media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna under Constanze Ruhm. Her graduation film Silent Revolution was awarded the Academy Prize. Schwarzwimmer completed the Berlin Programme for Artists in 2017 and was a participant in the Goldrausch programme in 2022. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (2020), at Deborah Bowmann in Brussels (solo exhibition, 2021), at Kasseler Kunstverein (2022), at Oberösterreichischer Kunstverein (solo exhibition, 2024) and in solo screenings at Kunstverein der Rheinlande und Westfahlen Düsseldorf as part of the ‘Another Eye’ series (2024) and at KW Berlin as part of a ‘Pogo Bar’ event (2024).

In Sans histoire, an epic river of thought, current fears of the end of civilization are both “without story” and “without narrative”. Disturbing images of animals in the night, visions of a technologized future and images of people dancing to excess or fleeing war combine to generate an apocalyptic atmosphere. Yet what seems dystopian at first conceals a utopian potential for a new beginning: time and again, Schweizer deploys images of waves, oceans and currents that sweep through what she shows, washing it away and absorbing it. Maya Schweizer draws our attention to oblivion as a reality determined by human life. In this paradox lies her proposal for confronting the existential fears of our time: Sans histoire is a space for honoring memory and a monument to oblivion.

Maya Schweizer, born in Paris, studied art and art history in Aix-en-Provence, at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste Leipzig (HGB), where she completed her pre-diploma, and at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin in the class of Lothar Baumgarten, where she graduated in 2006 and was awarded the title of Meisterschülerin in 2007. Schweizer works in a variety of media (including photography and textiles), although her focus is on experimental video works. She has had numerous solo exhibitions (including Jewish Museum Berlin, 2023, Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin - Exhibition winner of the HAP Grieshaber 2022 award, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2020/21, Kunstverein Leipzig, 2018, Kunstverein Langenhagen, 2013, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2016, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 2014, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2011, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster, 2010. She has shown her work in group exhibitions and at biennials including Neuen Berliner Kunstverein e.V., Berlin 2020, Manifesta 13 Marseille, 2020, Anren Biennale China, 2018, Kunsthaus Dresden, 2016, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, 2013, Centre Georges Pompidou, 2007,Berlin Biennale, 2006. Her videos have already been selected for numerous festivals and events, including Forum expanded during the 67th and the 71.rst Berlin International Film Festival, Berlinale (in 2017 and 2021), the Vancouver International Film Festival (2017, 2020) and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen several times. Examples of the Awards, project grants and residencies, include; Funding programme for women artists in film/video, 2024, Dagesh Art Award 2023, HAP-Grieshaber-Prize, 2022, e-flux film award, 2019, Artist in Residence, La Non-Maison, 2014, Studio grant, Karl Hofer Gesellschaft, 2008–2010, Villa Aurora, Los Angeles (2008). So far, four monographs on her work have been published: Voices, (Walther and Franz König, 2121), Where Ivy Cracks The Wall (Naima, Paris / Berlin 2019), Lieux de Mémoire and Desire (Archive Books, Berlin 2015) and Maya Schweizer?The Same Story Elsewhere (Spector Books, Leipzig 2010). Schweizer works in Germany and France.

This animation highlights the technological remnants of what is left behind. It is a simplistic creation consisting of color and rhythm. It incorporates X-ray images, figures from Pompeii, and footage of a turtle in Syria. This creation story symbolizes the ability to generate something new and release it, akin to a primordial soup of pixels. The animation emphasizes the constant act of looking, viewing, perceiving, and receiving images. It portrays the relationship between the photographic technique, the apparatus itself, "the machine," and the complexities of distortion in perception and imagination. The film was created using a broken special effects machine from the 1990s, resulting in the destruction, overexposure, underexposure, abstraction, and, ultimately, in the freedom of the material.

Lina Selander’s films and installations can be read as compositions or thought models, where ideas and conditions are weighed and tested. She examines the relationships between memory and perception, photography and film, language and image. The precise, rhythmic editing and use of sound create their own temporality and a strong inner pressure. Selander’s oeuvre recurrently explores a fascination for the phenomena and technologies that make images possible, there by enabling history to be documented. Montage is used in the films to juxtapose images, while entailing a potential loss of content. Image meets text in a flow where meaning arises from the ostensibly unrelated, like echoes through and between the works. Selander’s works constitute a dense archive of observations, occasionally in dialogue with other films, art or literature. Their subject matters often stem from historic or ideological junctions, where one system or physical place collapses and something new begins to emerge. Lina Selander (b. 1973) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. Selander’s work has been shown at Kunst Haus Wien, Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), London; Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; VOX - Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal and in international group shows such as Venice Biennale 2015; Kyiv Biennale 2015; Seoul Media City Biennale 2014; Manifesta 2012 in Genk, Belgium; Bucharest Biennale 2010; and at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Garden of No Return is a new hand-tracked VR experience by Sim Chi Yin and Dan Archer which chronicles the depletion of sand from Vietnam’s Mekong Delta and across Asia. The world is running out of sand. The insatiable demand for this non-renewable resource has led to large-scale environmental impact driven by rapid urbanisation and land reclamation. In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, land about the size of a football field is melting away into the river every day. For local residents, the land snaps off suddenly, sometimes in the dark of night, and robs them of their homes, shops and ancestral shrines. This work weaves together lullabies, laments, and poetry narrated by Vietnamese writer Kh?i ??n to speak about the erosion of both memory and site as the consequence of large-scale global sand mining. It combines reconstructed 3D terrain using photogrammetry and filmed sequences to allude to communal losses and extreme precarity in the global business flows of sand mining. It brings viewers to the site of the landslides and see, hear, and feel firsthand the landscape of the Mekong Delta where large-scale erosion is taking place, and convey the human cost of sand mining in a visceral and experiential manner.

Sim Chi Yin (b. 1978, Singapore) is an artist whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance and book-making. She is participating in the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has exhibited at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); the Barbican, London (2023); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2022, 2017) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial ( 2021). Her work is in the collections of Harvard Art Museums, The J. Paul Getty Museum, M+ Hong Kong, Singapore Art Museum, and the National Museum Singapore. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022-3) and is completing a PhD at King’s College London. Dan Archer is a creative technologist, computer scientist and immersive storyteller who co-founded Empathetic Media, an XR production studio, in 2014. EM leverages augmented, mixed and virtual reality to foster stronger connections and perspective-taking between the subjects in its stories and its audiences. A leading thinker and practitioner in the immersive space, Archer has researched and written about the link between empathy, impact and immersive story-telling. He was a 2016 fellow at the Tow Center at Columbia University, a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow (University of Missouri, 2014) and a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University (2011). He is currently completing a PhD at UCL focusing on evaluating embodiment and performance using biological signals in virtual reality environments, and exploring persuasive immersive technologies as a researcher at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Around 1920, a wealthy man from northern Italy returns from the First World War. Without having actively fought, neither having seen the blood of battle or an actual trench, he asks a group of people to stage for his camera scenes from the war as he imagined it. In 2024, four individuals are asked, in an attempt at freezing time, to didactically re-enact the scenes already staged in the 1920s photographs. In the corridors of a war museum housing a series of dioramas depicting war landscapes without figures, the endless cycle of the representation of war unfolds in an infinite suspended moment.

Giulio Squillacciotti is an artist and film-director born in Rome in 1982, living and working in Milan. After an education in Medieval Art History and Humanities in Rome and Barcelona, he studied Visual Arts at the University of Architecture in Venice. He was a fellow resident at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and one of the artists of the Dutch pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale. His work is oriented mainly on the invention and mutation of traditions by merging together fiction and historical facts. Using film, documentary, sound and scenography, Squillacciotti produces research-based investigations that revisits history, crafting new stories from subjective perspectives, religion, language and popular culture. He is currently working on his first fiction feature film, co-produced among Italy, Ireland and Poland, project recipient, so far, of the MEDIA Creative Europe Grant and the Screen Ireland writing fund.

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This second film from Young-jun Tak's on-going choreographic film series challenges the conventional binarity of gender presentations through queer male bodies and movements. It juxtaposes the hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity. The former is presented by Spanish Legion soldiers’ spectacular annual Maundy Thursday ritual carrying the life-sized crucifix in Malaga during the Holy Week that leads to the Easter Sunday. The latter can be found in Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet “Manon” (1974) where numerous male dancers worship the eponymous female protagonist in Act 2 Scene 1 by constantly lifting up and carrying her in the air. In spite of the two situations’ obvious difference, the glorification of two gender displays surprisingly reveals their similarity, for instance, in the lifted bodies’ open arms. In this regard, a new choreography, inspired by the specific scene of “Manon”, is commissioned to choreographer Jamal Callender—including himself as lead dancer—with five other gay male dancers, and a few preconditions were given to him: Manon should be male; his barefoot should never touch the dirt on the ground; and the choreography should be performed in Berlin’s popular gay cruising forest Grunewald. Throughout this film, the Spanish soldiers’ public ritual and the six male dancers’ choreography alternate while their bodies and movements, exposed to either crowded audience’s eyes on streets or hidden lustful gazes in bushes, try to fill the gap between the polarized gender presentations.

Young-jun Tak (born 1989, in Seoul, South Korea) is visual artist and filmmaker, and he lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Tak’s practice examines socio-cultural and psychological mechanisms that shape belief systems, ranging from simple objects of worship to sophisticated forms of religions. Blurring the lines between media, techniques, and subject matters, his films and sculptures pursue obfuscation as a tool of critique, and the human body is often exposed in the context of polarizing norms and conventions. Recent solo exhibitions include PHILIPPZOLLINGER (Zurich, 2024); COMA (Sydney, 2024); Atelier Hermès (Seoul, 2024); Julia Stoschek Foundation (Berlin, Dusseldorf, 2023); palace enterprise (Copenhagen, 2023); Wanås Konst (Knislinge 2023); O—Overgaden (Copenhagen, 2023); SOX (Berlin, 2022); and Efremidis (Berlin, 2022). He has participated in numerous international group exhibitions such as at St.Moritz Art Film Festival (2024); Bangkok Art Biennale (2024); the High Line (New York, 2023); Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023); Lyon Biennale (2022); Perrotin (Paris, 2022); KINDL Center for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2022); Berlin Biennale (2020), Seoul Museum of Art (2019); and Istanbul Biennial (2017). Tak won the “Love at First Sight Prize” at the 3rd St.Moritz Art Film Festival and the “TOY Berlin Masters Award” at the 9th Berlin Masters. He studied English Language and Literature, as well as Cross-Cultural Studies at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul.

Filmed in Moscow twenty years after Akerman’s d’Est and over ten years ago, COLDER addresses the deep conundrums of memory, place, and time. A camera locks on to past glories, lingers, skittishly- its tonalities are sombre, nonmetaphoric, obscure and difficult. Iandovka and Tsyrlina’s cinematic approach to memory is closer, more intimate, and more unstable and problematic—more true—to notions of remembrance than other sorts of cinematic representations. An almost graspable (post)cinematic spatiality - a space both interior (subjective and singular) and exterior (collective, communal) overcomes us - complete with an apparitional trace that haunts memory and event alike. COLDER opens the unstable spaces of memory to confront the presence/non-presence of events and our complicated and difficult relations to our histories and our selves.

Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina (both born and bred in Novosibirsk, USSR) are visual artists often working together on film and video.