Catalogue 2023-2024

The magical-realist camera follows the trials and encounters of Jonathan as he attempts to fulfill his mother’s final wish: that her ashes be laid to rest at Alexanderplatz, Berlin. Carrying her blue urn and searching for a suitable location, he attempts to gain permission, assistance, and sometimes merely empathy from his fellow citizens. From bridges to construction sites, electronics megastores to public fountains, encountering a nun, an artist, and various figures he traces circles around the concrete epicenter of the busy metropolis, revealing a place where commerce, branding, bustle, and tourism overshadow historical landmarks and personal relations. The private pathos of a son mourning his mother encounters the cold and normalized absurdity of hypercapitalism, history, and everyday city life.

Ulu Braun (1976) lives in Berlin and Lieksa. Between 1996 - 2005 he studied painting and film in Vienna, Helsinki, and Berlin. He has been using the medium of video to explore the field between the visual arts and auteur cinema since 1997 and he is one of the key figures who have transferred painting into video art. His works are regularly shown at film festivals and exhibited in art institutions.

What is the future of life in a world ever more dominated by Artificial Intelligence Can we develop a sense of connection and empathy towards highly elaborated machines? In a time when the lines between humanity and technology blur, "The Shape of Things to Come" takes audiences on a journey of human-AI interaction that challenges our perceptions of identity, love, and ethics. The film follows the activities of a team of pioneering researchers pushing the boundaries of AI technology, seeking to develop an AI with the capacity to feel and understand emotions. As they delve deeper into the mysteries of human emotions, they confront ethical dilemmas, technical challenges, and unforeseen consequences. Tensions rise as the project advances. Some believe that bestowing AI with emotions could revolutionize healthcare, therapy, and human-AI partnerships, while others fear the potential risks and moral implications. " The Shape of Things to Come " explores profound questions about the nature of consciousness, the essence of humanity, and the ethical responsibilities that come with playing the role of creator. As the project's success seems within reach, the researchers must confront their own humanity and the consequences of their ambition.

Pamela Breda is an artist, filmmaker and researcher living between Turin and Vienna. She holds a MA in Visual Arts from IUAV University (IT) and a PhD in Visual Arts from Kingston University (UK). She was appointed artist and fellow in residence at several international art institutions, including Max Planck Institute For Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, DE), Pratt Institute (New York, USA), Cité Internationale Des Arts (Paris, F), PROGR (Bern, CH) Botin Foundation (Santander, E). She was recipient of several art awards and fellowships, including IMèRA Fellowship (Marseille, F), Cantica 21 (MibaC, IT), Italian Council Award (MibaC, IT), Kingston University Phd Scholarship (Kingston, UK), Moving’Up (Turin, IT), JRC, Joint Research Center, European Commission (Ispra, IT), ‘Love Me Tender’, Stonefly Production Prize (Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano, IT), Italian Institute of Culture (Moscow, RU), Photography Award, IED, European Institute of Design (Venice, IT). Her film research explores the intersections of visual imaginaries, narratives, and stories that often remain on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. With a deep passion for shedding light on the voices and experiences of marginalized communities, her work dives into the complex web of human existence, particularly focusing on the clash between old and new technologies that shape worldviews.

Dietmar Brehm's Hylo-Vision-Plus. Version 1 is a minimalistic study of ecstatic moments and it is named after eye-drop medicine.

born in 1947 in Linz 1967-72 studied painting at the University of Fine Arts/Linz. Professor at the University of Fine Arts/Linz. Drawing + painting, experimental films and photography. Numerous filmscreenings and exhibitions at home and abroad. 1974-1989: 74 Super8 films since 1990: 16mm films since 2000: video

In Becoming Unreal the camera floats through urban mega-projects of Istanbul like modern mosques, the new airport and various hotel buildings. These spaces are marked by an emptiness, as they embody more of a trophy, a sculpture or an object and have no longer anything to do with the human body. A ghostly absence characterizes the buildings. They are like an immaculate representative facade, one of concealment and hiding. A facade made up of complicated shell companies and offshore providers.

Viktor Brim (born 1987 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan) is an artist and filmmaker. In his work he deals with the relationship between cinematic spaces, urban phenomena and the concept of power. His focus is on the physical manifestation of power structures and their territorial extension. Most recently, his works have been presented at Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain, Eye Filmmuseum and Max Ernst Museum Brühl.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon is the title of a Nordic fairytale about a heroine who leads a cursed prince, turned into a white bear, to a place that lies East of the Sun, West of the Moon. This lovestory, in which the fate of humans and animals are intrinsically linked, is later on used in the song with the same name, most famously interpreted by Frank Sinatra (1940). During a residency in Sweden (at Hybrida), a centuries old iron industry wasteland that turned into endless forests where the wild wolves roam, Broersen and Lukács conceived n a collaboration with Smári Róbertsson a new version of East of the Sun, West of the Moon. They transformed Sinatra’s beguiling song into a sometimes desperate, growling plea for love, embodied by a white wolf. Spinning in circles, the hybrid wolfman(creature) is torn between the natural and the virtual, the animal and the man inside him.

Margit Lukács and Persijn Broersen work and live in Amsterdam (NL). They are graduates of Graphic Design from the Rietveld Academy Amsterdam, followed by a MFA at Sandberg Institute Amsterdam. Furthermore they were artists in residence at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Their work, consisting of layered projections, digital animations and spatial installations, has been exhibited by institutions and organisations worldwide, among others at Remix Nature/Cultural City of Europe ESCH (LX), HEK, Basel (CH), WRO Media Biennale, Wroclaw (PL), the Biennale of Sydney (AU), Le Lieu Unique, Nantes (FR), LUMA Arles (FR), Wuzhen Biennial Now Is The Time(CN), U2/UCCA Beijing (CN), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL), FOAM (NL), MUHKA (BE), Centre Pompidou (FR), Kröller Müller (NL) and ERES Foundation Munchen (DE). Their films have been shown at a.o. ARTE TV,  Oberhausen Film Fest (DE), LAForum (US), Kassel Dokumentar und Filmfestival (DE), Videomedeja, NoviSad (RS), Oberhausen Film Fest (DE), LAForum (US), Rencontres Internationales Paris Berlin@Louvre Paris and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, the NewYork Film Festival (US), and the domestic festivals IDFA and IFFR.

Just be glad it's not you combines texts sourced from various threads on the topic of narcissism from www.quora.com. Quora is an online forum for crowd sourcing answers to questions that vary vastly in subject matter and are often posted anonymously. Various self-proclaimed experts have listed accounts, definitions, and directives on the theme of narcissism. A selection of these texts are displayed in a synchronized installation across three screens, edited to appear in time to a specially commissioned hard techno track from sound designer Antoine Hureau, accompanied by an integrated LED light installation. This video, sound and light installation creates an environment of information overload that is reflective of the environment of information overload that we find ourselves in within digital culture, and within the wealth of language, accounts, opinions and stories that we find online. Walking a thin line between tragedy and comedy, the work contains an ironic sensibility, allowing complex and difficult issues to be addressed with a light touch.

Samuel Brzeski (1988, London) is an artist and writer living and working in Bergen, Norway. He studied English Literature at University of Sheffield, UK (BA) and Fine Art at Bergen Art Academy (MA), and participated in the Mountain School of Arts program in Los Angeles, USA. Recent exhibitions of note include Lydgalleriet, Bergen (2023), Bærum Kunsthall, Oslo (2023), bb15 Space for Contemporary Art, Linz (2022), Meta.Morf, Trondheim International biennale for art and technology (2022), Østre, Bergen (2022), Galleri Box, Gothenburg (2022), Chao Art Centre, Beijing (2021), and KRAFT, Bergen (2021). His work was included in the inaugural exhibition of the New Norwegian National Museum, Oslo (2022) and is in the collection of Haugland Museum, Norway. Samuel was a writer in residence with Contemporary Art Stavanger (2022), and with Lydgalleriet (2020-2021) and has published several artist books. He has co-run the Bergen-based art writing collective and publishing platform TEXST since it was established in 2016. Samuel works as a visiting tutor to Bergen Art Academy and Bergen Architecture School.

'Songs from the Compost: Mutating Bodies, Imploding Stars', shot in the pine forests and sand dunes of the Curonian Spit, is a hypnotic exploration of nonhuman forms of consciousness and different dimensions of symbiotic life: interdependence, surrender, death, and decay. The images gradually layer, alongside intimate lyrics of a song that channels the desires of an entity shapeshifting across different genders, voices, and beyond-human embodiments. Featuring a cast comprised of local youth, alongside performer and choreographer Mami Kang, the film unfolds through a specially conceived song, choreography and costumes. Horizontality in the choreography undoes the usual verticality of the human figure, unfurling her into the landscape.The performers’ bodies are sites of activity, though they’re often horizontal, pulled toward the earth and one another, moving through the forest, along the sand dunes and water. The song lyrics draw on the work and words of biologist Lynn Margulis, celebrating the role of bacteria in making life and the collaboration between the single-cell organisms possible, as well as concepts by the science-fiction author Octavia Butler, who employed tropes of symbiosis, mutation, and hybridity to challenge hierarchies and categorisation.

Egl? Budvytyt? (b. 1981, Lithuania) is an artist based in Amsterdam and Vilnius working at the intersection between visual and performing arts. She approaches movement and gesture as technologies for a possible subversion of normativity, gender and social roles and for dominant narratives governing public spaces. Her practice, spanning across songs, poetry, videos and performances, explores the persuasive power of collectivity, vulnerability and permeable relationships between bodies, audiences and the environment. Her work was shown amongst others at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Vleeshal, Middelburg, NL, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary art (RIBOCA); Renaissance Society, Chicago, Lofoten International Art festival; Block Universe festival, London; Art Dubai commissions; Liste, Art Basel; 19th Biennale of Sydney; De Appel Arts Centre; CAC in Vilnius, and Stedeljik Museum in Amsterdam. Egle was resident at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR, 2012) and at Wiels, Contemporary art centre, (Brussels, BE, 2013).

Lev works at a construction site in a new suburban residential area in Western Germany. But things change, friends will leave and the forest becomes a place of desire

Maximilian Bungarten born in 1993, in North Rhine-Westphalia, studies Documentaryfilm at HFF Munich and Université Paris VIII. Together with Camille Tricaud and Felix Herrmann, he founded the production company Benedetta Films. His award-winning short films have screened at numerous international film festivals including ISFF Clermont-Ferrand and art institutions like Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

“The Peaceable Kingdom” is a deep fake ontology. It is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces metaphorically and physically as both totems and discrete intelligent beings. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks.

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modeling, video editing, and image editing programs. Bunkley, an NZ/USA citizen, has also been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA. International screenings include the White Box gallery in NYC and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. In 2012 Bunkley was an award winner at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the «Now&After» Festival. He took part in the Athens Digital Arts Festival and File Sao Paolo 2017, 2018, and 2019. Bunkley screened his video, Ghost Shelter/6 at The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany in 2018, Docfest Kassel 2019 and Jihlava IDFF 2021 and 2022, Czech Republic. And Video Art Miden and Video Art Projects, Municipal Gallery of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece, FILE SP 2023 exhibition and Hochkantfilmfest, Portrait -video on advertising billboards, Bremen, Germany in 2023 Recent group exhibitions include the “Stories of Rust”, Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga, NZ, and “Green Around'' in Taipei, Taiwan in 2019, the Auckland Botanic Gardens 2022 and “Sculpture on the Gulf” 2022, Auckland, NZ, the “2021 National Contemporary Art Award”, Waikato Museum, Waikato, NZ and “Visions in the Nunnery”, Bows Art/Nunnery Gallery, London in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include Solo exhibitions include the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand in 2018, the Institut für Alles Mögliche/Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Berlin 2019, The Rabbit Room, Napier, NZ 2022, at Scott Lawrie Gallery, Auckland New Zealand 2022, and aGallery, Whanganui, NZ.

A Chant for the Bees is a film about everyday events: a visit to a nearby copse by the creek, some goats at the farm, some young tennis players volleying and breathing heavily on a summer's day, a young family preparing to embark on a ferry, a visit to the seals at the aquarium, some amusement park rides, the neighbour’s cat on the front porch, a stroll past the supermarket on the high street, a view of some ships at harbour. The original music is composed by Alan Gasser. The libretto is based on a list of the 100 largest companies in the world from Fortune Magazine. It is sung as a Georgian Chant by Alan Gasser and Emma So.

Bill Burns comes from a bookselling family in Saskatchewan. He learned about art and tractors from monks, poets and farmers. He is artistic director of the Big Pond Small Fish Laboratory in Toronto. His works are included in collections at the Museum of Modern, New York; Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; Tate Britain, London; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; and the Cabinet des estampes, Geneva. His published books and essays include When Pain Strikes, a scholarly anthology, (University of Minnesota Press, 1999: Minneapolis) ; Bird Radio, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2007: Berlin) ; The Guide to the Flora and Fauna Information Service:0.800.0FAUNA0FLORA, (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2008: London, England) ; Three Books About Plants and Animals and War (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig 2011: Cologne). His two most recent books are Hans Ulrich Obrist Hear Us, a memoir about his life as an artist (Black Dog Publishing, 2016: London) and Bill Burns: Three Short Films and Some Happenings about Donkeys, Goats, Cowboys and Container Ships (Griffin Art Projects: 2023, Vancouver). He studied at Goldsmiths’ College, London (MA) and lives in the trees at Toronto.

Un père trouve refuge dans les souvenirs qu'il a créés avec sa fille à qui il n'a pas parlé depuis des années. Le film se transforme en intermédiaire pour tenter de les unir à travers des images, des sons et des lettres.

Eneos Çarka est diplômé du Master DocNomads en documentaire créatif et il est actuellement doctorant et Annenberg Fellow en études cinématographiques, arts et pratiques médiatiques à l'Université de Californie du Sud. Ses films ont été projetés dans de nombreux festivals, galeries et événements culturels tels que IDFA, FIPADOC où il a reçu le Prix Tënk, HotDocs, GoShort, Festival dei Popoli et plus encore. Il a été membre du jury du concours IDFA pour le documentaire jeunesse en 2022.

Banzavóis, in assonance with maize, is an invented word coined by the Italian writer C.E.Gadda for corn, symbol of Lombard agricultural production. Banzavóis may also stands for empty bellies, the laborers and sharecroppers who found job in large numbers in the first Lombard industrial plants at the end of the 19th century. The word suggests a geographical-political shift in an imaginary South America: brought back to nowadays Brianza, it is well suited to its landscape rich in tropical flora, globalized right into the inner structure of a drastically changed nature. Banzavóis follows for two years the radical transformation process of the former Isotta Fraschini industrial area in Saronno, 20 km from Milan. A coring throughout a century, a kaleidoscopic journey in the history of a site abandoned for 30 years, six hectares of ruins and six of invasive species. The factory becomes a palimpsest for a narration in which antifascism, memory of work, socio-political achievements are gradually interwoven with today discontinuation landscape.

Lorenzo Casali (1980) is a visual artist and filmmaker working mainly in site-specific projects, which start from the analysis of the complex network of relationships existing in a given place, from the study of the cultural, social, political and economic stratifications that define it. Since the early 2000s he has participated in prizes, screenings, exhibitions and residencies in Italy and Europe. Alongside his artistic research he carries out teaching activities, he is currently professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome (photographic documentation) and the Academy of Fine Arts Carrara in Bergamo (video editing).

Nuits et jours, Otto efface pour un centime des visages sur Google StreetView. C'est l'une des tâches que lui et ses amis du monde entier réalisent sur Amazon Mechanical Turk, une plateforme de micro-tâches. Au côté de ses amis turkers, Otto plonge dans un monde robotique qui soulève la question de l'humanité.

Natan Castay a grandit à Bruxelles. Pour son film de fin d'étude à l'IAD il réalise En attendant les robots à la suite d'une expérience personnelle. Lors du confinement il a perdu son job d'étudiant dans un restaurant et s'est retrouvé à taper sur internet "comment se faire de l'argent en ligne". Il tombe sur Amazon Mechanical Turk, un site de micro-tâches. Son premier travail consiste à observer des photos satellites et répondre à la question Swimming pool/No Swimming pool pour un centime l'image. Très vite l'envie lui est venue de faire un film sur cette nouvelle forme de travail. Durant un an Natan a rencontré des centaines de Turkers dans le monde entier et a essayé de les inclure dans une écriture mêlant fiction, documentaire et expérimentation Amazon Mechanical Turk fait cyniquement référence à une légende au sujet d'un automate capable de jouer aux échecs et de battre Napoléon ou encore Benjamin Franklin. En réalité sous les mécanismes était caché un être humain.

The film aims to interrogate double-sided effects of how cinema itself has changed and developed through time, and how it affected both workers in film productions and its audiences along its journey.

Chanasorn Chaikitiporn is a filmmaker and moving image artist. Who is interested in exploring and interrogate socio-political histories of Thailand with questions of culture, political thought, identity and personal historical memory in perspective and relation to the semi-coloniality. In combining fiction film and documentary film genre, he investigates on archival, found footages and declassified documents. Chaikitiporn is a member of Rapid Eye Movement (REM), a experimental film and media screening in Bangkok, Thailand

As a dancer from an immigrant family, Ça?da? often feels more of a performer around them than on the stage. When he decides to contact his estranged father in Turkey, the boundary between real and performed begin to blur as his story is woven into the production of a new piece by internationally renowned Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. How much does the absence of his father and the traumatic silence that has filled the void contribute to why he feels like an outsider in the only place he’s ever called home? IN FOUR MOVEMENTS weaves dance and documentary through an intimate journey of self-discovery as Ça?da? faces his past, his performance, and his desire for belonging.

Daniel Chein is an independent filmmaker whose work explores transculturalism and expressions of identity in the performative. His last short About a Home premiered at the 2021 Slamdance Film Festival and is distributed by Argo. He has received support from Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Field of Vision, ITVS, Princess Grace Foundation, among others, and his films have screened at dozens of festivals. He is a Sundance Fellow and was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2023. Daniel is based between Berlin, California, and Taipei.

A voyage to the northern border of Taiwan — the eponymous Beigu Islet, a sea rock roughly 300sqft submerged under water half of the time — delves into regional histories, the gaze on borderline landscapes, and the ambivalent state of Taiwanese territory and subjectivity.

Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary, and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, vision techniques, and embodied knowledge, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject. His work has been shown at 25 FPS, HR; Arkipel, ID; Festival ECRÃ, BR; and Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, UK. He has participated in the Oberhausen Seminar and residencies including RAIR Philadelphia and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.

The legacies of two historical figures converge around lost settlements within a rural Florida village. One historical figure was an assassin, working under a series of aliases on behalf of pro-slavery secessionists during the American civil war in 1865. The other figure shed his western name to become an anti-colonial freedom fighter in the 1830's, battling the American government's acts of stealing land and murdering the native people of Florida. These two men cross paths posthumously in a trio of disappeared towns, marked by nothing more than brown historical markers. To tell these stories of deception and displacement, the film is structured as a travelogue, combining landscapes, archival texts, and highly abstracted voice-overs. In Nomotopowell, names and places are largely obscured, and knowledge itself is nearly lost in the shadows of the village cemetery, side roads, and moonlit swamps.

Brent Chesanek has screened his films at CPH:DOX, FIDMarseille, RIDM (Montréal), Seattle IFF, DOXA (Vancouver), FIDBA (Buenos Aires), Singapore IFF, NovosCinemas Pontevedra, IndieMemphis, Visions.MTL, Denver IFF, Art Basel Miami Beach, and more. He has presented to the industry programs at Ji.Hlava New Visions Forum and Champs-Élysées US-In-Progress. He has a BA from the University of Florida.

As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland.

Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist living on Kaurna Land (South Australia). Her work explores the effects of migrant displacement and post-memory through impressionistic forms, often with other family members as subjects. Since graduating with Honours in painting at UniSA in 2014, she has made numerous films including “Blind Body”, “Missing” and “The Plastic House”. The latter was filmed on her family’s farm and has screened at MIFF, New York Film Festival and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Her films were also screened as part of a retrospective at the 11th Cambodian International Film Festival. Crossing into the gallery, she received the 2022 Porter St Commission from ACE Gallery to make her first solo exhibition and multi-channel installation “Skin Shade Night Day” which was exhibited as part of The National: Australian Art Now at MCA in 2023.

Sur un plateau de tournage en pleine nature, les membres d’une équipe s’agitent. Eva, l’actrice, lorsqu’elle n’exécute pas les indications bancales de la réalisatrice, profite des dons de Merkabas. C’est la médium du plateau. Eva rêve de créer sa propre société de production de film pornographique et souhaite mettre toutes les chances de son côté, y compris dans les mondes invisible. Ça tombe bien, Merkabas adore aider. En marge du film, une étrange relation de coaching se tisse entre les deux femmes. Elles échangent sur leurs réalisations, leurs conditions de travail ou leurs visions du monde. Elles se partagent leur secret ou: “comment avoir plus d’influences?”. Petit à petit, ensemble, elles délaissent doucement la réalité du tournage et la réalité tout court.

Artiste, réalisatrice, fondatrice et chargée de coordination chez Puppy Please Née à Toulouse en 1994, Robyn Chien vit et travaille à Marseille. Diplômée de la Haute École des Arts du Rhin, elle cocrée avec Lullabyebye et Gordon B.rec la société de production Puppy Please, au sein de laquelle elle réalise des films pour adulte. Leur but : faire des films porno et pouvoir faire des films porno. La réalisation des films, leur distribution et ce qui les empêche d’exister devient son terrain. En parallèle, elle réalise des films. Elle utilise la fiction comme un outil qui vient briser les impossibilités qui se mettent sur son chemin. Grâce à un processus similaire à l’action de la magie, elle répare le destin lorsqu’il est injuste. La performance et la caméra rendent compte et fixent ce changement. Elle a réalisé “Eva et Merkabah”, un film pour lequel elle a reçu le soutien Traversées du CIPAC, de la FRAAP, du réseau Diagonal et de la DRAC. Son travail a été présenté dans diverses expositions, notamment : So Far (Casino du Luxembourg, 2016), La Relatividad de llévar el mundo a cuesta (Quinonera, mexico, 2017), Là où les vents se croisent (Syndicat Potentiel, Strasbourg, 2018), Les martinets dorment en volant (CRAC Altkirch, 2018) et au festival Latitudes Contemporaines (Lille, 2021).

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.

The Gift is a film about the use and abuse of culture in times of political and ideological crisis. It tells the story of a competition for a perfect gift that could heal a broken nation. The Gift is composed entirely of historical ready-mades that include some of the most perturbing examples of art, music and architecture deployed as trojan horses of political powers. The film’s locations include iconic buildings which were all political gifts themselves - including Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party HQ in Paris, the Palace of Nations in Geneva, Mount Buzludzha in Bolgaria and the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.

Jasmina Cibic is a Slovenian artist currently based in London, who works in film, performance and installation. She represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project “For Our Economy and Culture”. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, The Highline New York, macLyon, Museum Sztuki ?ód?, Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, CCA Glasgow, Phi Foundation Montreal, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Kunstmuseen Krefeld along with group exhibitions at MAXXI Rome, Steirischer Herbst ‘19, MOMA NY, Marta Herford and Guangdong Museum of Art China. Cibic’s films have been screened at the Barbican London, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Montreal, Pula Film Festival, HKW Berlin, Louvre, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris, Aesthetica, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Dokfest Kassel and Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. Cibic was the winner of the MAC International Ulster Bank and Charlottenborg Fonden awards (2016), the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image Award (2020) and the Film London Jarman Award (2021).