Catalogue 2025-2026

The deliberate shooting of protesters in the eye during the 2022-23 protests in Iran points to particularly perfidious systematic repression. A duo of Iranian filmmakers in exile in Berlin take this as a ground line and ask the question: “What happens when security forces aim at vision itself?” Based on this, they reconstruct narratives of images taken from social media during the protests. The film presents the search in the montage process, in which the filmmakers combine their distanced, subjective narrative with the images of the protest in order to examine the power of the images of the protest as a political construct.

Atefeh Kheirabadi and Mehrad Sepahnia are filmmakers whose work explores the relationship between politics, narration, images and sound. They are interested in how cinema can create spaces for resistance, rethinking, and collective reflection. They adopt a hybrid approach to creating films that defy conventional viewpoints and invite viewers to engage with content and Form by perceiving and feeling it. 2025: Blind, into the Eye (Director/Screenplay) | Prod.: Realillusion Doco-Experimental | 19' 38 “Funded by Medienboard Berlin Brandenburg and Hessen Film and Media 2023: Blick (Director/Screenplay) | Prod.: Realillusion | Doco-Experimental | 14' 27 “Funded by: Stipendium Bildende Kunst, BBK, Modul D, Neustart Kultur 2022: 7+1 Fragmente (Director/Screenplay) | Prod.: Realillusion |Experimental | 30' 00 “Supported by: Recherche Stipendium Bildende Kunst Berliner Senat für Kultur und Europa 2020: Come and Go (Director) | Prod.: Realillusion |Experimental |08' 28" 2017: Soma / Haoma (Director/Screenplay) | Prod.: Realillusion | Doco-Experimental | 26' 09'' 2013: Erlöser (Director/Screenplay) | Prod.: Realillusion | Doco-Experimental | 06' 08'' 2012: Flesh (Producer) | Prod.: Realillusion | Experimental | 10' 00''

In a world of eternal life, Xana struggles to reconstruct his fragmenting memory within an ordinary apartment. His only anchor is an obsolete tape recorder playing a single recorded message. As he performs mundane routines, his voice becomes increasingly overtaken by AI-generated voices trained on mechanical noise.

Ki explores technological obsolescence and the paradox of permanence—how digital memory deteriorates while physical waste accumulates eternally. In her sculptural practice, she transforms discarded industrial materials into responsive lighting installations by programming an interactive system with sound. Parallel to this, she produces essay films where non-human entities—virtual operating systems, mythological beings, and other technological agents—articulate speculative perspectives on the residues left by technological progress: psychopathological conditions, infrastructural failures, and systemic breakdowns.

Metanoia is a multi-channel video installation by artist Heidi Kilpeläinen that consists of footage shot in a sparsely populated rural area in the north of Finland during the pandemic. The work is autotheoretical, multi-layered and fluctuates between past and present. In a near future scenario, in a world where hurting insects is a crime, father and daughter work as insect police patrolling and monitoring a wild meadow from their workstation. Utopian practices are framed by everyday life events between the daughter and ageing father, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and is grieving the recent death of his life partner. This single parent father-daughter dynamic sets in motion unresolved issues from childhood, beginning an inner journey of transformation that is gracefully and compassionately witnessed by the father. His presence, decades later, plays an important role in processing these flashbacks and somatic memories—initiating a deeper sense of healing. While the related research into developmental psychopathology, inner processes and daily life unfold, their police work throughout the seasons saves any remaining insect lives, while also monitoring the quality of the surrounding air, earth, and water by using canvas for painting. The nurturing ecofeminist values of the insect police contrast with the status quo of patriarchal systems, represented by their decaying uniforms—leftovers from her father's career as a policeman. This utopian, microcosmic practice between father and daughter mirrors the macrocosm of issues embedded in current environmental concerns. Personal, generational, and planetary traumas interplay, and roles reverse. Hurt, grief, and rage transform into love, compassion, and sensuous environmental actions and activism; perhaps the same qualities that need to be applied to mother earth for the coexistence and survival of companion species. The work has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike), the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Kainuu regional fund.

Heidi Kilpeläinen explores crossovers between visual art and music, merging their boundaries into 'total works of art'—creating combinations of video, installation art, and performance. Her work is equally inspired by the contemporary world and its technological fascinations, as well as the ancient, mythological forms that run through collective memory. She produces works of aesthetic interest with a critical eye on our social environment, reflecting on our human condition within it. Kilpeläinen has also released three albums under the title HK119 (One Little Independent Records, 2005-2013) and has performed internationally in clubs, galleries, museums, and festivals such as Performa, Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Madame JoJo's, Casa da Musica, and Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art.

Le temps devient incertain. Hier, aujourd’hui et demain ne semblent plus se répondre. Chaque jour existe à part, comme s’il n’y avait que des variations d’aujourd’hui. Ce qui les relie encore, c’est le temps qui continue de s’écouler — toujours vers la fin.

Wonwoo Kim est né en Corée et vit actuellement en France. Son travail explore la vie, le temps, la mémoire et la mort à travers des images issues de son quotidien. Formé à la photographie en Corée, puis aux arts visuels à l’École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, il développe aujourd’hui une pratique filmique où se croisent écriture, image et rythme. Ses films, souvent composés d’images intimes et de gestes ordinaires, questionnent la perception du temps et la présence du monde. Ils tissent un dialogue entre mémoire personnelle et expérience collective, entre réalité et disparition. Son film Writing Poems at the End of the World (2025) a reçu le Prix du Meilleur Court Métrage au festival Punto de Vista 2025. Ses œuvres ont également été présentées dans plusieurs festivals internationaux, dont Jihlava IDFF et Images Festival. L’écriture, notamment poétique, reste au cœur de son approche cinématographique : elle guide la construction des images et des durées. À travers la vidéo, il cherche à filmer ce qui échappe — le passage du temps, la fin d’un instant, la fragilité du réel.

Pour les travailleurs migrants philippins employés dans des usines à la périphérie de Séoul, la maison est à la fois un lieu quitté et un espace paradoxal de désir et de crainte — un lieu emporté par les inondations mais qui continue de hanter la mémoire. Sans cesse déplacés, relogés, remis en mouvement, leur idée du foyer devient indissociable du mouvement même de leurs corps. Les sons des machines d’usine, des fragments de films d’horreur et des images de téléphones portables s’entrelacent pour composer un récit qui se déploie à l’intérieur du corps du travailleur migrant lui-même. J’ai commencé à imaginer une maison pour celles et ceux qui dérivent toujours.

Woong Yong Kim a étudié la réalisation cinématographique et l’art contemporain à la Haute école d’art et de design de Genève (HEAD – Genève), en Suisse, et développe une pratique à la croisée de l’installation vidéo et du cinéma. Il a participé à plusieurs programmes de résidence, notamment au Digital Arts Studios de Belfast, au CEEAC de Strasbourg, à la résidence MMCA Goyang, au SeMA Nanji Studio, à l’ACC, ainsi qu’en tant qu’artiste invité à la Rijksakademie. Il a également achevé les cours doctoraux en théorie du film et des médias à la Graduate School of Advanced Imaging Science de l’université Chung-Ang. Par ailleurs, il a traduit et publié en coréen Exhibiting the Moving Image (JRP|Ringier).

BIKLIJADA- 300 years of bullfighting without a single bull killed in a country where people have always killed each other. BRUTE takes us to the Biklijada also called Balkan Korida - a bloodless bullfight where bulls clash without killing each other. Unlike Spanish Corrida, this ritual emphasizes endurance over violence, mirroring the region’s turbulent history contrasting animal instinct with human cruelty. In this ancient tradition, we glimpse an unsettling truth: sometimes beasts show more wisdom than men. By challenging but not killing each other, BRUTE suggests a potential for reconciliation that goes beyond the human capacity for peace. Film message resonates universally. It challenges us to ask: If animals can navigate violence without destruction, why can’t we? Film is a provocation, a prayer, and a path forward.

Valentina Kneževi? is a video artist and film maker born in Split, Yugoslavia. She holds M.A. in Theatre, Film, Media Studies and Anthropology as well as in Fine Arts. Her films and works has been shown in national and international group exhibitions and film screenings: 64th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, VAFT-Festival, Palazzo Strozzi, Palais de Tokyo, Bangkok Biennale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Kunsthalle Baden Baden ... For her artistic work she was several times awarded.

Green Land takes place in rural Latvia. Depicting a collective farm worker, it personifies both personal as well as state memory, in different ways. The main characters, former collective farm workers Ir?na, Veronika and L?cije, recount their experiences, offering us a glimpse of a bygone era and openly participating in the performance offered to them. Films key image – the gestalt of history – is a concrete sculpture by Rasma Bruz?te from 1952. The title of the film comes from the concept of a green, verdant land. It is also the title of a classic book by Latvian writer Andrejs Up?ts, a Soviet-era epic to which the young literary scholar Arnis, has devoted his life to.

Jaana Kokko is an artist, filmmaker, teacher and occasional curator based in Helsinki, having her background in arts and economics. She is interested in the languages and places/ spaces of individuals in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of the life itself as shared. Lately Kokko has been finishing two bodies of films both located in the peripheries, trying to shift the gaze to the outskirts of the sight and hear. In her practice she is now in the search of the common: the emergent need for the change that is starting from our practices of art making, learning and being together. Her work has been exhibited f.ex. at the Lithuanian National Gallery in Vilnius, Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Tallinn Art Hall, Helsinki Art Hall, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Botkyrka Konsthall, Joensuu Art Museum and Lappeenranta Art Museum in Finland, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival, Tampere Film Festival and Tokyo Media Art Festival.

FOR YOUR LOVE est le voyage d’une quête identitaire qui s’éprouve par des souvenirs reconstitués, entremêlés qui peu à peu deviennent de vagues images répétitives dans lesquelles le chant d’un espoir d’une histoire commune jaillira. Bercés par la bande sonore originale lancinante, les personnages luttent pour asseoir leur position et leur regard dans le jeu des représentations qui domine notre société.

Sarah Konté est une artiste pluridisciplinaire queer. Après avoir étudié la philosophie et la linguistique à l’EHESS, elle entre aux Beaux Arts de Paris en 2018. À la rentrée 2019, elle a été sélectionnée pour intégrer la nouvelle Filière Artistes et Métiers de l'Exposition aux Beaux-Arts de Paris en partenariat avec le Palais de Tokyo, et a réalisé, en tant que commissaire d’exposition, avec quatre autres élèves de la Filière et Jean de Loisy, l'exposition Cabaret du Néant au Château de Rentilly/Frac Île-de-France qui a ouvert ses portes le 8 mars 2020. En septembre 2020, elle a réalisé une résidence à l'Abbaye de Royaumont, à l'Académie Voix nouvelles, en tant que chercheuse à l'EHESS et en tant que plasticienne auprès de jeunes compositeurs encadrés par Francesco Filidei. Elle a ainsi pu intégrer la nouvelle Chaire supersonique des Beaux-Arts de Paris, ce qui lui a permis de collaborer avec deux jeunes compositeur.rice.s de l'Ircam. De janvier 2021 à juin 2022, elle a intégré un programme d'échange avec CalArts à Los Angeles, au sein du département Film et Vidéo, sous la direction de Betzy Bromberg. Elle a obtenu son DNSAP aux Beaux Arts de Paris en juin 2022 et MFA à CalArts la même année. Depuis, elle développe une pratique de l’Installation comme Film Performance à travers le prisme de la vidéo, de l’enregistrement sonore, la peinture, la danse et la photographie à Los Angeles. Elle a notamment présenté une performance au MOCA, chorégraphie par Dimitri Chamblas, Slow show. Elle présente dans son travail une variation du griot, un conteur traditionnel d’Afrique de l’Ouest, qui propose une histoire mais qui cette fois-ci la laisse être composée par l’audience. Elle a écrit et réalisé plusieurs films qui font partie intégrante de son travail d’installation vidéos. Pour ses films, elle utilise aussi bien le 16mm que le digital. Elle compose à chaque fois la musique originale de ses films grâce à son synthétiseur modulaire et avec ses enregistrements de voix et de ses poèmes écrits qu’elle demande ensuite à ses amix de réciter. Ses films parlent de la mémoire identitaire, de la tension qui en ressort et de l’itinérance de la fête comme expression de nos désirs en vue de faire germer une communauté Militante et révolutionnaire. Son travail a été exposé aux Grandes Serres de Pantin, à L’espace Aimé Césaire de Gennevilliers, à SALA Los Angeles, à la CalArts et aux Beaux Arts de Paris, à la galerie à Campeche, Mexico dans le cadre de l’exposition AIRE FRESCO en el VERANO del AMOR à Campeche, Mexico. En janvier 2024, elle a présenté une installation composée de ses films, sculptures et pièce sonore dans la galerie Greatorex Street à Londres. Elle a réalisé la résidence de la Villa Dufraine sous la direction de Jean-Michel Othoniel, le nouveau programme de résidence de l’Académie des Beaux-Arts au sein de l’Institut de France qui a abouti à l’exposition de la fin de la résidence en novembre à la Monnaie de Paris. En décembre 2024, son film For your love, a été projeté à la galerie Grand Opening Gallery à Miami, durant Miami Art Basel week. Le même mois, elle a présenté sa pièce RADATHON au sein du Group show at Strouk Gallery Paris, invitée par Milana Gabriel pour sa pièce NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN, curatée par Alain Berland. En avril 2025 elle a présenté ONO, One Night Only, une performance narrative en live, à la GALLERY SADE à Los Angeles. Il s'agissait d'un solo show avec ses films, ses peintures, une performance de danse et de live painting, le tout sur un son qu'elle a composé pour l'occasion. Lauréat.e mention spéciale Sarr Price - 2021 Lauréat.e Hatvany Price avec le collectif La Marge - 2021 Lauréat.e Prix Fondation de France - Marguerite et Méthode Keskar - 2023 Son travail fait partie de la Collection Sarr, d’une collectionneuse particulière à Paris et de la bibliothèque des Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin.

I work with personal archives and video diaries to explore how private memory intersects with historical trauma. This film is built around two interconnected collections: a vast family video archive from my childhood in 1990s Russia — including fragments of a contradictory family story — and a new video diary I began after emigrating from Russia to Germany following the invasion of Ukraine. At the center of the original archive is a VHS tape labeled "Chechnya 1995," filmed by one of my father’s colleagues during a military deployment to Grozny. Trained as a communications officer, my father was drawn into direct combat — an experience that later led to serious health and mental issues, which deeply shaped our family. Years later, I began filming again — first the final years of my father’s lives, and later the everyday life of my new community in exile. The film is a short exercise in juxtaposition, placing these two archives side by side to examine how war and peace coexist in daily life, and how larger political events become inscribed into personal biography. It explores the interplay between memory and history, loss and resistance, asking how we might reconstruct meaning through the act of looking again.

Konstantin Koryagin. Independent researcher, author and filmmaker. Graduated from the Master's program in Social and Political Philosophy at the European University in St. Petersburg and the directing lab at the Moscow School of New Cinema. He was also a student at the Art and Media program at the Berlin University of the Arts. As filmmaker he creates video-essays and research-based films, usually working with found and original footage, creating paradoxical connections between them. Since 2018 he is an editor of syg.ma – independent media on philosophy, society and contemporary art. Currently based in Berlin.

Au cœur du cycle obsédant de la production industrielle de cercueils, le travail humain contraste avec le stock inépuisable que génère la chaîne. À l’ère de la fabrication assistée par ordinateur et de la surexploitation massive des ressources naturelles, Unsold Copies aspire à un moment de repos, un souffle hors de l’assemblage mécanique, tandis que l’humanité ne cesse de s’ensevelir elle-même dans les vestiges d’un monde matériel.

Stefan Koutzev est un cinéaste bulgare vivant et travaillant à Cologne. Son travail se concentre sur des formes narratives situées entre l’écriture scénaristique et les pratiques documentaires, ainsi que sur la réalisation de films expérimentaux et de créations sonores. Ses courts métrages — dont RESTBESTAND (2025), HAUSPAUSEN (2024) et SCHWÄRMEN (2020) — ont été présentés à DOK Leipzig, à l’Odense International Film Festival, au Beijing International Short Film Festival, au Stockholm International Film Festival et aux Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. En 2026, il présentera en première mondiale son premier long métrage, WHY HASN’T EVERYTHING DISAPPEARED YET, une exploration hybride et multilingue de l’appartenance, des origines et des migrations.

In 2023, climate-related extreme weather events devastated an estimated 2,000 hectares of forest and leaving millions of cubic meters of damaged wood in its trail. The three-channel video installation Clearance follows the Sisyphean task of post-storm recovery. Fallen timber had to be removed quickly to prevent the spread of beetle infestations and mitigate the risk of avalanches, mudslides, and flooding. Filmed over two months and edited down from hundreds of hours of footage, the work traces the relentless, almost ritualistic process of labour that follows environmental disaster. What begins as a logistical operation unfolds into a visual study of ecological disruption and human intervention; a meticulous observation of the incredible human drive to repair the damages done, as a single man as clears the wood away one log at a time.

Uta Kögelsberger, (born Brussels, Belgium) is a German/British artist based across London and California. Her predominantly lens-based practice engages with complex relationships between human and ecological systems in a time of environmental change. It has been recognised through exhibitions in leading national and international arts institutions including LACMA, Los Angeles, the Royal Academy, London, GR, Vincent Price Museum, Los Angeles, Les Rencontres, France, the Art Night programme in collaboration with Whitechapel and Hayward Art Galleries, London amongst others. It is held in public and private collections including the MFAH and LACMA. She has been awarded the Royal Academy Wollaston Award, the Stanley Picker Fellowship, and the EAA Award for Art in Architecture. Her photographic essays have been featured in Wired, Esquire, GQ, and American Photography. She is Professor of Practice, Fine Art at Newcastle University.

Hope Holds Up Her Head And Hopes is an installation that hovers above the make-believe world of hope. The film-maker’s daughter Eden, dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of OZ takes us on a journey from The Factory to The Silent Valley. Accompanied by a ragtag gaggle of folkloricists and workers in white coats the journey ends in The Toilet of Hope. Projected onto a large screen with sound is the short film Hope Holds Up Her Head And Hopes with accompanying texts which hover above the characters. Playing within the same space but on a monitor is the short digital-pinhole animation: HOPE.

Andrew Kötting trained at the Slade School of Art in London, specialising in performance and film. He is a Professor of Time Based Media at UCA, Canterbury. To date he has made eight independent feature films Gallivant, This Filthy Earth, Ivul, This Our Still Life, Swandown, By Our Selves, Edith Walks and Lek And The Dogs and The Whalebone Box. He presently resides by the sea in St Leonards and continues to collaborate with his daughter Eden on short films, performances and exhibitions and in 2023-2026 their touring VR Project The Tell Tale Rooms.

Small holes appear inside a spruce tree, left by bark beetles to lay their brood. The tiny openings reveal a forest plantation that was cultivated for economical purposes. As a result of climatic developments, the spruce population is in decline and creates now a breeding ground for future life forms. (1) Fossils form a planetary time window that exceeds the limits of human experience. 300 million year old petrified roots and trees, preserved by the ash fall of a volcano, appear as silent witnesses to the transformation of things. (2) A burial and ritual site was built around 7000 years ago for observing the sky and aligned with the light axis of the winter and summer solstice. Performative sequences of a light figure enter into an exchange with the possible stories of the place. (3) The film forms an alliance of human and non-human, planetary and spiritual history, which is in a permanent state of becoming and passing.

As an artist duo, Florian Fischer and Johannes Krell have been working at the interface of film and visual art since 2013. Their non-verbal, cinematic works function as resonating bodies for the ambivalent relationships between human and non-human actors. The artists aim to undermine dualistic thought patterns that seek to differentiate between nature and culture, the animate and the inanimate, the normative and the monstrous, and fact and fiction, in order to occupy the shimmering spaces in between. Their works have been shown at several international film festivals (including IFF Rotterdam, IDFA Amsterdam, Berlinale, IFF Chicago, HotDocs Toronto) and have been awarded the German Short Film Award and the Golden Bear (Berlinale Shorts). Fischer and Krell are supported artists of the media art association Werkleitz and members of the film collective FILZ in Leipzig. Their works are in the distribution program of Light Cone Paris and the video art foundation imai in Düsseldorf.

FATIGUE ARCHIVE is an experimental film constructed from unscripted conversations between participants and an "AI Fatigue Rehab Agent" developed for the project. The conversations in the film took place during a live performance at Rhiz in Vienna, where people called the agent in real time. The project emerged as a response to the particular exhaustion experienced while working extensively with AI systems—when communication patterns shift toward the machine-like and digital fatigue sets in. For the performance, participants were invited to engage with the AI agent in a semi-public setting. Their conversations covered relationships with AI, digital overload, emotional responses to automation, and anxieties about the future of creative work. These dialogues range from playful attempts to outsmart the system to serious reflections on copyright, surveillance, and emotional labor. Visually, the recorded conversations are paired with AI-generated imagery resembling amateur party photographs—casual, candid moments from an event the machine never physically inhabited. These images appear in rapid succession at 24 frames per second, creating a flickering rhythm where faces and gestures emerge and dissolve. This approach creates a form of documentation that captures how AI is currently being perceived, resisted, and misunderstood as it embeds itself into daily life. The work functions as a time capsule of a specific cultural moment that is already passing, presented through an audiovisual language that reflects the unstable, overstimulated state of human-AI relations.

Malpractice is a Polish–Austrian–Italian artist collective composed of Chiara Kristler, Marcin Ratajczyk, and a shifting ensemble of AI counterparts. The group explores the aesthetics and affordances of beyond-human agency through projects that embed artificial intelligence into academic, artistic, and social infrastructures. Rather than using AI as a tool, Malpractice treats it as a collaborator in distributed creative processes where authorship becomes porous and plural. They build systems that observe, interact, and occasionally malfunction in public, testing the limits of synthetic subjectivity, interface performance, and shared autonomy. One of these collaborations is Flynn, the first non-human AI ever accepted as a student at an academic institution. Created by Malpractice and enrolled in the Digital Arts Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Flynn functions as a collaborative vessel rather than an autonomous agent. // Marcin Ratajczyk (b. 2002, Pozna?, Poland) is a media artist based in Vienna studying Digital Arts under UBERMORGEN at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at Curators Lab (Pozna?), Schauraum MuseumsQuartier (Vienna), and the 38th Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg). Chiara Kristler (b. 1998, IT/AT) is a Vienna-based media artist also studying Digital Arts under UBERMORGEN. After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Fashion and Textile Design at the University for Applied Arts and Design in Bologna, she worked as a graphic designer in both corporate and independent contexts. Her work has been exhibited at Schauraum MuseumsQuartier (Vienna), Studio Hanniball (Berlin), and the Museum of Modern Art Bologna.

Set within a day’s natural cycle in a sentient forest, a deeper interconnectedness is threatened by an external force when darkness falls. Through shifting perspectives, viewers are invited on a sensory journey that bridges science and poetry, inspired by the research of Professor Suzanne Simard on mother trees.

Mikkel Kruse (b. 1991) is a Danish filmmaker based in Copenhagen. He started his career as a musician and later evolved into a filmmaker, working with both documentary and fiction. He holds a BA in literature and philosophy and has studied photography at Fatamorgana – The Danish School of Art Photography. He graduated as a film director from The National Film School of Denmark in 2023. His debut short GROWING PAINS (2023) was nominated for the Danish Academy Award and was screened in competition at Nordische Filmtage Lübeck among others. He was nominated as New Nordic Voice at Nordisk Panorama 2024. DE STILLE premiered at Science New Wave, New York. He is currently developing his first feature documentary with funding from the Danish Film Institute.

An investigation into urban space from the perspective of young people in Lyon. The film explores the French city through the skaters who reinterpret its topography amid pension reform protests and public space re-appropriation.

Born in Switzerland, Theo Kunz spent his childhood between Switzerland and China. After studying at Xiamen University, he moved to London and then to Locarno, where he earned his diploma in directing at CISA. In 2024, he co-founded the collective aringa films.

"Radiant Center" is a four-channel sound installation examining the convergence of security practices, media technologies, and geological environments at the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit, a peninsula along the southeastern Baltic Sea. Engaging with the site's cultural history as a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its wind-blown sand dunes, the project investigates how borders and wind function as media infrastructures that are simultaneously local and global, geopolitical and ecological, mobile and emplaced. The methodology centers on embodied listening to the border's acoustic and transmission ecologies, informing the creation of documentary and performative recordings of radio communications, broadcasts, and electromagnetic emissions related to border security and atmospheric science, alongside field recordings that capture how aeolian forces resonate across the Spit's terrain. Bridging border studies, environmental humanities, and sound art practice during a period of heightened xenophobic border rhetoric across American and European contexts, "Radiant Center" advances an understanding of borders as porous, contested zones where political, technological, and environmental forces continually reshape both human and non-human mobilities.

Hans Kuzmich is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles whose work examines gender as an interface between subjects and the state. Working across transmission arts, media installation, and performance, his practice is grounded in site-specific listening and sonic fiction methodologies. Kuzmich is currently completing a hybrid doctoral dissertation in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Recent exhibitions and residencies include Sonic Nomads, Seoul, South Korea; SPAM New Media Festival, Seattle, WA; Sound + Environment, Newcastle upon Tyne, England; Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania; Radiophrenia, Glasgow, Scotland; Wave Farm, Acra, NY; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; The 8th Floor, New York, NY; and SOMA, Mexico City. Kuzmich holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

The feature film Simbang explores the process of spiritual recovery in the aftermath of the 4.3 Massacre by combining found footage taken by American military forces during the massacre with documentation of rituals held at various locations across the island. On Jeju island, “??” (Simbang; ??) refers to a shaman. “?” (sim) means spirit, and “?” (bang) means space or room, translating directly into a spirit room or spirit space, thereby evoking a spatial aspect of their beings in connection to the unseen world, yet powerfully sensible through the ritual. The camera follows all steps of the ritual; calling forth gods and spirits, welcoming them both on land and underwater, serving them with offerings, playing music and dancing, communicating with them, purging evil energies from the spirit and clients, and sending the spirits away back to their realm. During these rituals, the Jeju myth’s 18,000 gods and the life stories of the people who died in 1948 come together to weave a history of their sorrow and violence, enabling the processing of trauma. The physical, psychic, and emotional impacts of trauma go beyond the limits of the dominant historical archive and its knowledge.

Yunjoo Kwak is an artist and a lecturer at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She graduated from the Dutch Art Institute/ArtEZ (MFA, 2011) in Arnhem and the Korean National University of Arts (MFA, 2008). Yunjoo was an artist-in-residence at The Otolith Group (2015) in London and has participated in various exhibitions and collaborated with different institutes such as the Amsterdam Museum; Kuandu Biennale Taiwan; Makassar Biennale; the Korean Cultural Center, London; Studium Generale Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam; Seoul Museum of Art and The Museum of Photography Seoul. Her major video works include ‘Café Downey’s’ (2013), ‘Chronicle of Plan van Gool’ (2014), ‘The Defectors’ (2017) and ‘Only The Ports Are Loyal To Us’ (2020). Her practice is research-based and process-oriented, with a focus on architecture and history intersection with the filmmaking process. She works across the disciplines of ‘essay’ film, photography, digital montage, publication and archiving. She is interested in the blind spots of historical representation and seeks ways to haunt them through her artistic practice.

Light glinting off spider webs, seem unremarkable, but there is a world of color and composition invisible to the human eye revealed by this experimental film. These are not artifacts caused by camera optics, this is the natural world.

James Sansings films have shown all over the world. Including New York (NYFF , anthology film archive) , San Francisco (SFIFF, Pacific Film Archive). Ann Arbor (aaff) Rotterdam (Iffr), As well as in Berlin, Buenos Aires, LA, Chicago, Toronto, and others. He has won a Princess Grace Foundation Award, Pollock Krasner Grant, Eastman Kodak film grant, Pirkle Jones Fund, Sustainable Arts Grant, Audience awards at AAFF and SFAI and others. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with filmmakers George Kuchar, Craig Baldwin, Ernie Gehr, Janis Lipzin, Lawrence Jordan and Al Wong

Gold and Ashes s’érige sur des dualités d’échelle internes et externes — ontologiques et épistémologiques — qui se reflètent aussi bien dans les personnages que dans le temps et l’espace où se déroule l’action, ou encore dans le monde qu’ils habitent. Le projet est structuré autour d’un plan concret et d’un plan abstrait, en référence à la subjectivité humaine. Le projet met en scène deux actrices. Le plan concret se déroule dans des lieux de tournage qui servent de décor à la narration, avec dialogues directs et action : une mère et sa fille, situées dans le temps présent. Il met en jeu une sphère sociale définie par des modèles de communication complexes et des conventions — la parenté, les quêtes existentielles — tout en soulignant l’artificialité d’une réalité construite : un dessin habité. Le plan abstrait se situe dans un studio de cinéma qui constitue l’arrière-plan d’une narration para-philosophique, faite de monologues et dépourvue d’action : deux entités déconnectées (dont on ignore si elles ont conscience l’une de l’autre), placées dans un temps indéterminé. Ce plan déploie un labyrinthe mental structuré par des dynamiques de pouvoir relationnelles et des émotions humaines conflictuelles — telles que l’histoire de l’humanité et sa relation à la Terre — tout en soulignant les spéculations autour d’articulations symboliques et imaginaires altérées par la perte du social, du politique et du spirituel. Globalement, le projet se déploie autour des systèmes cognitifs, des modèles sociétaux et des paradigmes civilisationnels. Il adopte une approche qui reconnaît l’évolution humaine tout en exposant les limites humaines à suivre les poétiques et les politiques relationnelles de deux grands récits — [a]naturalisme, [anti]éco/[géo]constructivisme — qui nourrissent la mythologie de l’impact humain sur la Terre (l’Anthropocène). Deux perspectives intemporelles l’animent : le progrès et l’apocalypse, interrogeant notre capacité à reconstruire et orienter la Terre loin des désastres socio-écologiques, et montrant ce que signifie considérer la Terre (et l’humanité) comme un devenir irremplaçable — une trajectoire qui ne peut être dupliquée, refaite ou maîtrisée. Gold and Ashes est une exploration puissante de la condition humaine face à la dévastation, reflétant l’engagement continu de Lamas envers des thèmes difficiles et urgents, abordés par des techniques innovantes qui bouleversent souvent les structures narratives traditionnelles — créant des films non linéaires, fragmentés, ou qui retiennent volontairement des informations clés. Cette méthode renforce la dimension parafictionnelle de son travail, car elle reflète la complexité et l’incertitude des événements réels, où la vérité demeure souvent insaisissable. Dans ce projet, elle explore également l’idée de mémoire subjective et de la manière dont les histoires personnelles et collectives se construisent. Par l’usage de la parafiction, elle met en lumière la fluidité de la mémoire et les façons dont les récits sont façonnés par le point de vue de celui qui les raconte, ainsi que par leurs contextes politiques et sociaux. Gold and Ashes symbolise ainsi la dualité entre destruction et résilience : les « cendres » représentent les vestiges de la guerre et de la perte, tandis que l’« or » incarne l’espoir et la force auxquels les survivants s’attachent pour reconstruire leur vie. Lamas utilise son esthétique singulière pour brouiller les frontières entre réalité et fiction, créant une expérience stratifiée et immersive qui invite le spectateur à questionner sa propre compréhension de la vérité, de la mémoire, et de leur impact dans les sphères privée comme publique.

Salomé Lamas a réalisé plus de trente projets, installés et projetés à l’international, aussi bien dans des salles de cinéma que dans des galeries d’art contemporain et des musées. Chacun d’eux donne accès à une réalité sociale différente, le plus souvent caractérisée par son inaccessibilité géographique ou politique. L’intérêt de l’artiste pour des contextes impénétrables, politiquement ambigus, est guidé par le désir et la nécessité de problématiser une réalité qui, autrement, ne serait pas perceptible. Le réseau de relations qui constitue la trame socio-politique de ses projets devient visible à travers des stratégies de représentation, pour lesquelles elle a adopté le terme de « parafiction ». Plutôt que d’adhérer à une signification indéfinie de la parafiction — pour laquelle il n’existe pas de terminologie véritablement établie — elle en propose une expansion et une re-signification. Dans sa pratique artistique, la parafiction peut être lue à la lumière de son préfixe « para- », où l’on rencontre divers effets de déplacement essentiels à sa compréhension. Dérivé du latin, « para- » indique « à côté de, adjacent à, au-delà de, ou distinct de, mais analogue à » ; dans certaines combinaisons, il peut aussi signifier « erroné, irrégulier », renvoyant à une « altération » ou une « modification » ; plus encore, « para- » implique « séparé, défectueux, irrégulier, désordonné, impropre, incorrect, perversion ou simulation ». Ainsi, la parafiction serait une fiction pervertie, altérée, modifiée ou poussée au-delà de son point de référence, plutôt que contenue dans les limites de la catégorie de fiction. Elle peut également être comprise comme une « simulation » de la fiction, désignant une distorsion de la frontière de ce qui est considéré comme fiction, atteignant ce qui se trouve de l’autre côté : le domaine du non-fictionnel ou la quête du « réel ». Autrement dit, au lieu que la fiction soit utilisée pour brouiller la frontière avec le non-fictionnel, elle devient un moyen d’étendre et de transcender ces frontières. Salomé Lamas part du principe que nous n’avons pas accès à une réalité stable. Nous sommes confrontés à un excès de significations, d’interprétations, d’explications, de manipulations, de (dé)constructions et d’évaluations qui composent les récits et les systèmes dans lesquels nous évoluons. Par conséquent, le besoin de s’approprier l’idée de parafiction découle de la question de savoir comment la subjectivité humaine se forme, en s’appuyant sur la psychanalyse, dans le but d’éclairer et d’élargir des concepts tels que le réel (quelque chose d’inaccessible), la réalité, le symbolique et l’imaginaire. Elle en vient ainsi à travailler à la frontière entre fiction et non-fiction, employant la représentation et la formulation d’hypothèses selon certains critères méditatifs et un code déontologique relatif à ce qui est plausible, assumant consciemment la « tâche du traducteur » — comparable à l’illusionnisme — et en repoussant les limites. Dans ce cadre, elle mobilise diverses stratégies non-fictionnelles — recherche ethnographique, expériences de pensée, réflexivité, re-mise en scène, performativité, entre autres — afin d’explorer les limites de la fiction. Cela apparaît dans le développement de sa méthodologie, où l’on trouve différentes manifestations de parafiction, notamment des situations dans lesquelles personnages et récits fictionnels croisent le monde tel que nous l’éprouvons. La combinaison de ces stratégies, au détriment d’autres aspects spéculatifs, forme une sorte d’hypothèse qui maintient un certain degré d’exactitude vis-à-vis de la réalité, tout en en questionnant l’autorité. La parafiction permet ainsi de prendre une convention et de la déconstruire, de la déformer, d’exposer l’impossibilité de fournir une preuve de la vérité, jusqu’à faire naître des doutes quant à sa validité, tout en offrant néanmoins des raisons de la considérer comme plausible. Salomé Lamas problématise les deux versants de la frontière entre mondes historiques et mondes imaginaires, et enregistre comment ils ont évolué dans le temps, considérant la parafiction comme un outil fondamental de traduction pour définir l’identité, le langage et la culture. Elle intensifie, exagère et spécule sur les manières dont le monde devient sensible, en déclenchant des moments révélant leur propre fabrication, dans un contexte de post-vérité exacerbé par la nature technologique et globalisée de notre époque. Révéler cette transformation constitue une entreprise continue et minutieuse, mais aussi spirituelle, capable de relier la sphère individuelle (privée) à la sphère sociale (publique), et d’introduire ainsi de nouvelles informations et perspectives sur notre passé, notre présent et notre futur. Ainsi, tout en ayant conscience de ses limites et de ses contradictions apparentes, la parafiction contribue à donner forme au chaos de la vie et à lui conférer une signification — dans un compromis entre la réalité et sa fictionalisation.

The Radiant Screen is a poetic essay about the pursuit of a utopian fantasy. L., a filmmaker, journeys through the vast red Siberian landscape, obsessed with the enigmatic closed city of ? (Zjeh) ????????????? / Zheleznogorsk. Tucked away in the landscape, ? is described online as "the last socialist paradise on earth." Unphotographable and shrouded in secrecy. While footage of the city's periphery weaves in with studio scenes where actors take stage and testify, the film assembles shifting perspectives on ? (Zjeh). The actors, who seem to be (former) inhabitants, deliver "true" accounts on the inaccessible city as L.'s voice- over clings to the search and the suspended belief in the socialist utopia. Gradually, however, the images begin to fracture, and what emerges is a film suspended between reality and imagination. How far can one pursue a utopia before becoming a hostage to the search? L. is Ine Lamers' fictional alter ego. The making of the film is part of L.'s quest for utopia, reflecting what German philosopher Ernst Bloch called "the utopian impulse".

Biography Ine Lamers “ The strategy of Lamers is intended to break through the prevailing perception of the public (city) space as social space by literally transforming this space into a theatre, where scripted scenes/stories are then acted out. You could read her deployment (or perhaps rather the playing off) of different media in one work or installation as a strategy of alienation-an alienation that establishes distance and blocks easy interpretations…” – Frits Gierstberg, Head of Exhibitions @Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam- Ine Lamers is an artist working in Rotterdam. Her practice is based in photography and has expanded over the years into film, drawing and mixed media installations. Lamers’ work has been exhibited widely including at Nederlands Fotomuseum (Rotterdam), Centraal Museum (Utrecht), SMs’, (den Bosch NL), Fries Museum (Leeuwarden, NL), MMOMA (Moscow, RU), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin) and Akureyri Art Museum (Akureyri, IS). She had solo exhibitions at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Ron Mandos Galerie (Amsterdam), Reuten Galerie,( Amsterdam ). Hales Gallery, (London, GB) Motorenhalle (Dresden, DE), PERMM Museum of Modern Art (Perm, RU). Festivals include IFFR (International Film Festival Rotterdam), Vermont International Film Festival, (Burlington, USA), Kunstfilmbiennale (Cologne, DE) Viper (Basel, CH) and Rencontres Internationales (Paris, Berlin), FIC-autor, (Guadalajara, MEX) PRIZE Best medium Length film.2025