The awards ceremony for the 37th European Media Art Festival took place this evening at Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

The EMAF Award for an outstanding work of media art went to artist Monica Maria Moraru for I Am Also Part of the Three Turns. The experimental film traces the effects of an earthquake in Bucharest and a concurrent flood in the small Romanian town of Buzau through fragmentary oral accounts. The EMAF Award is endowed with 3,000 euros. The Dialogue Award for the promotion of intercultural exchange goes to Peng Zuqiang for his film The Cyan Garden, which centres on a revolutionary radio station that proves impossible to find and an Airbnb apartment run by a friend of the artist in their shared hometown. The prize is 2,000 euros. Hey Sweat Pea by Alee Peoples is awarded the EMAF Media Art Prize by the German Film Critics Association (VdFk). In a humorous and unexpected manner, it tells the story of how the aging of parents collides with an existential impulse in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The prize is 2,000 euros.

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Prize were awarded by a jury of media artists and curators, this year including Marwa Arsanios, Adam Khalil and Pieter-Paul Mortier. Film critics Alejandro Bachmann, Sebastian Markt and Gabriele Summen formed the jury for the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics Association (VdFk).

According to the jury, the EMAF Award for I Am Also Part of the Three Turns went to Monica Maria Moraru “for her examination of the history of the 1977 Bucharest earthquake and the attempt to rewrite this historical ‘so-called’ natural disaster that became instrumentalised by the political authorities.” “The film shows the seeming stability of orders, be they natural or political, in order to question those categories and our relationship to them.” The jury also awarded a special mention to Belfi by Ismaël Iken. The film explores the fascination with a broken piece of a golden bank card, in which fiction and reality intermingle.

The Dialogue Prize for The Cyan Garden by Peng Zuqiang is awarded “for its haunting and fascinating historical archaeology of the sounds and voices of an underground radio station,” as the jury explains its decision. “This excavation of voices from the Malaysian revolution brings to life both a historical intimacy and the history of the intimate as it existed at the time.” The jury awarded a Special Mention to detours while speaking of monsters by Deniz Şimşek. The film tells the millennia-old legend of a water monster whose myth dates back to the ancestors of the Armenians and Kurds around Lake Van – a region that witnessed the ethnic cleansing of both peoples.

With Hey Sweet Pea by Alee Peoples, the jury of the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics’ Association honours a “particularly convincing cinematic answer” to the question of how to describe the feeling that “a gigantic nothingness is gradually consuming everything,” according to the jury’s statement. “By taking the Never-ending Story told to children and adults out of the virtual world and transferring it to the real world. And by creating films with almost nothing, only with the things that are at hand, that can be visually grasped or audibly perceived, virtuously and modestly, playfully and insistently, with depressed laughter.” A Special Mention in this category goes to Ann Carolin Renninger for Der Wind nimmt die mit. The film tells the story of Rovin, Maria, and Christopher, all three of whom are in search of something.

The full text of the jury’s statements can be found here. The exhibition of the 37th EMAF is on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 26 May.

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) would like to thank its sponsors, especially nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Lower Saxony Foundation, the VGH Foundation of the Sievert Foundation for Science and Culture and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e.V.

In a few days’ time, the 37th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück. Today we would like to offer you an overview of our complete programme.

Around 100 films will be screened over the five days of the festival – in the categories International Competition, Feature Film, Artist in Focus, SPECTRAL.Unburdened Recollections and in the thematic programmes Feelers, Sensors. The exhibition Feelers, Sensors, curated by Inga Seidler, consists of ten installations which are on display at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 26 May. Six talks and performances will explore the festival theme in greater depth and address current discussions within the national cultural landscape. In addition to the University of Osnabrück and the Music and Art School Osnabrück, three international universities will also be presenting their work in the Campus section. These include the Norwegian Kabelvåg School of Moving Images, the KASK Art Academy from Ghent and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Theme: Feelers, Sensors

To orient ourselves in the world, we engage with it through our feelings and perceptions. We scan it with our senses and use them to adjust our proximity and distance to others. This year’s EMAF theme Feelers, Sensors explores the role of sensory perception in the human and non-human experience of the world, and how a technologically enhanced sensorium changes orientation and interaction within the world, allowing it to be shared and communicated in a different way.

We are observing an increasing privatisation of space, which also manifests itself in our sensory relationship with the world, for example when we use noise cancelling to isolate ourselves from disturbing external stimuli. Online communication, as well as “smart“ or ”sensitive“ technologies are also transforming the way we interact with each other through our senses, raising the question as to which forms of inclusion or alienation they promote. At the same time, encounters in physical space – such as demonstrations or group meditations – can communalise or reorganise sensual and emotional experiences. The sentience of non-human creatures is also playing an increasingly important role, as is our responsibility for their habitats. What or who is perceived, publicly seen or heard is also a political question. How can suffering that exceeds the individual’s capacity for perception or that paralyses language remain communicable? How can we develop more sensitive feelers and more just sensors?

Film Programmes

This year’s thematic film programmes are curated by three artists who have each chosen their own approach to the topic. Jamie Crewe’s contribution is inspired by anthropological observations. Film and sound works explore moments of trance, the dissolution of boundaries and speaking in tongues. Oraib Toukan focuses on the heart as a fundamental sensory organ – an organ whose function is to see and hear. Anna Zett’s programme reflects on filmmaking and screening as a participatory, poetic practice driven by the desire to connect. The screenings will be accompanied by live performances and spoken contributions.

The International Competition and the Feature Film Section will present recent films by internationally renowned filmmakers and up-and-coming artists, covering a wide range of experimental working methods. Many of the films revolve around the question of how we learn from the past for the present. They reconstruct historical events, imagine alternative histories, and read possible paths into the future from the memories of others. The relationship to land and territory is another focus. In a documentary and experimental approach, the works tell of origins and orientation, of loss and migration, of living and staying.

This year’s EMAF Artist in Focus is British artist Phil Collins. He is internationally renowned for his work, which draws attention to marginalised voices and experiences through film, installation, performance, and live events. Based on dialogue, often long-term collaborations, and a particular sensitivity to local contexts, he develops works that are situated between art, politics, and pop culture: between club culture and the prison industry, karaoke and political resistance, shopping channel and theatre. The series features film works from over 20 years.

The successful collaboration with the analogue film collective LaborBerlin, initiated last year under the title SPECTRAL, will be continued this year. The joint project is dedicated to the re-screening of historical Expanded Cinema works, and this year it will present analogue multiple projections and film performances from the 1960s and 70s.

Exhibition: Feelers, Sensors

The video installations, as well as interactive and VR works contrast human sensory experiences with those of other species such as bacteria, insects, and animals, challenging prevailing anthropocentric views. The artists imagine new forms of cyborgs and hybrids of humans, animals, and bacteria, allowing visitors to adopt their perspectives or enter into dialogue with AIs. They invite visitors to reflect on how the perceptual and sense-making capacities of different entities shape, influence and change each other. On show are works by Caitlin Berrigan, Erik Bünger, Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez, Aay Liparoto, Rita Macedo, mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot), Tanita Olbrich, Petro Oliveira, and Lotta Stöver.

This year’s venues include Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Lagerhalle and Filmtheater Hasetor, Kunstraum hase29, Haus der Jugend, Museumsquartier Osnabrück and skulptur galerie.

We are once again expecting more than 1,000 visitors to the opening on Wednesday 24 April at 7.30 pm at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. On Saturday evening, three prizes will be awarded at the festival: the EMAF Award (3,000 euros), the Dialogue Prize (2,000 euros), and the EMAF Media Art Prize of the German Film Critics’ Association (2,000 euros).

Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information and interviews. If you require images, please also contact presse@emaf.de.

An important meeting place for emerging artists, the EMAF Campus presents current projects by classes from leading European art and film schools. This year, classes from Germany, Belgium, Norway, and Spain will be guests, presenting exhibitions and film screenings developed especially for the festival.

On the occasion of its 35th anniversary, the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM) is presenting a broad selection of experimental short films from recent decades, showing student productions in various media formats: from web series to material films, from found-footage music videos to autobiographical films.

The film programmes of the KASK art academy in Ghent, which were created in 2022 and 2023 by master’s students in film, animation, and photography, move thematically between alienation from and immersion into one’s own world.

Under the title In the Belly of the Vacuum Cleaner, the Norwegian Kabelvåg School of Moving Images is developing an exhibition around the image of the vacuum cleaner, which, like our consciousness, sucks in the environment, collects it, and reassembles it into new (dis)orders.

With BLACKBIRDS SINGING IN THE DARK, the joint exhibition of the University of Osnabrück and the Universidad de la Laguna Tenerife portrays the perspectives of a young generation marked by the current presence of crises, wars, social injustices, and social traumas.

Harmony of Mindscape, another project by students from the Department of Art at Osnabrück University in collaboration with students from Osnabrück’s Music and Art School, allows visitors to experience how they react to certain stimuli and to sense the point when they change.

Accreditations are still possible until 19 April.

Please feel free to contact us for interviews and questions. We will be happy to send you film stills upon request.

Picture Copyright: Alma Bech

The film programmes of this year’s EMAF offer a broad overview of contemporary experimental film and artists’ moving image – from current short and feature-length film to historical works and Expanded Cinema. Numerous artists will be in attendance to show and discuss their work. Nearly 100 films and film performances from all over the world will be presented.

Today we would like to give you a first insight into some of the programmes.

International Competition

The International Competition, which features short and medium length films, is the heart of the film programmes. In this year’s selection, many films revolve around the different layers of space and time and the question of how we learn from the past for the present. They reconstruct historical events, imagine alternative histories, and read possible paths into the future from the memories of others. The relationship to land and territory is another focus. Both documentary and experimental, the works tell stories of origins and orientation, of loss and migration, of living and staying.

Messaline Raverdy‘s Ôte-toi de mon soleil (2023) sensitively documents her encounters with an elderly man who lives in a labyrinthine universe of collected and accumulated things. Meandering conversations about knowledge and memory, about capturing and holding onto the world, unfold between the filmmaker and the man as they tidy up. In I Am Also Part of the Three Turns (2024), Monica Maria Moraru reconstructs from oral accounts, roughly gridded images, and allegorical tableaux two Romanian landscapes that were simultaneously affected by natural disasters. Personal losses and the need to improvise with what is left, overlap with the state‘s deliberate erasure of space and the creation of newly built landscapes. Vika Kirchenbauer‘s essay-performance video COMPASSION AND INCONVENIENCE (2023) explores the first public exhibitions of contemporary art in London in the mid-18th century. In a series of performed scenes, historical sources are re-read and given voice in relation to the institutional conditions under which art becomes visible today. Alee Peoples‘ Hey Sweet Pea takes a humorous and playful approach to the theme of disappearance. Between re-enacted voicemail messages from her own mother and borrowings from the children‘s science fiction The Neverending Story, a narrative space opens up that attempts to capture the very real progression of nothingness, the destruction of our environment, but also the loss of loved ones.

With further films by: Razan AlSalah, Tolia Astakhishvili & James Richards, Boris Dewjatkin, Carl Elsaesser, Ismaël Iken, Mira Klug & Johannes Gierlinger, OJOBOCA, Peng Zuqiang, Leonardo Pirondi,Martyna Ratnik, Messaline Raverdy, Steve Reinke, Ann Carolin Renninger, Margaret Salmon & Maria Fusco, Reiji Saito, Clare Samuel, Deniz Şimşek, Jordan Wong, Xin Shen, Yu Wang, Micah Weber, Chris Zhongtian Yuan.

Artist in Focus

EMAF is proud to present Phil Collins as this year’s Artist in Focus. Collins is internationally acclaimed for a socially engaged practice that addresses the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Taking different forms – from films, photography and installations, to performative situations and live events – his work foregrounds aspects of lived experience and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed. In a newly commissioned essay Dominic Paterson asserts that Collins “uses his own strategic reproduction of normative media frames as the occasion to trouble (or queer) them. His work acknowledges the force of such frames through its reiterating of their strongly determining effects—a feature that is always itself performative in the work; always a matter of conspicuous gestures, demonstrations, enacted poses, and repetitions. The task Collins’work has taken on in recent years, however, is not just to critique or subvert existing framings, but rather to collectively create conditions in which communities can shape, for themselves, the spaces in which they appear and perform as themselves.” Among other works spanning more than twenty years, the films on show include Bring Down the Walls (2020), an argument for the abolition of the American prison-industrial complex and a celebration of the dance floor as a site of transcendence and liberation; his documentary musical Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014), a modern day city symphony and a love letter to Glasgow; as well as marxism today (prologue) (2010), which shines a light on the political and social upheavals since the fall of the Berlin Wall through the personal stories of three former teachers of Marxism-Leninism and an Olympic gymnast from the GDR.

Expanded Cinema & Performance

The collaboration with the analogue film collective LaborBerlin, which commenced last year under the title SPECTRAL. Unburdened Recollections, will be continued this year. The joint project is dedicated to the re-staging of historical Expanded Cinema works, and this year, it will present analogue multiple projections and film performances from the 1960s and 1970s. A classic of Expanded Cinema by Malcolm Le Grice (curated by Cinzia Nistico, Filmwerkplaats Rotterdam) and a recently restored work by Dutch artist Babeth Mondini-VanLoo (curated by Simona Monizza, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam) will be reconstructed. In a panel discussion, the participating artists and curators will discuss the restaging and archiving of live cinema, as well as the ethical issues surrounding the reconstruction of historical works.

Kerstin Schroedinger & Oliver Husain will premiere their new live-streaming-performance Hypericin Yellow-Red Movie (2024), which is based on research into alternative AIDS treatments in West Germany in the 1990s. Experimental medicine, photochemical processes, as well as old and new transmission media come together in unexpected ways. The performance will be shown at the festival and on drip-drop.tv, and will be accompanied by a screening programme.

Please feel free to contact us for interviews and questions. We will be happy to send you film stills upon request.

Picture copyright: Phil Collins

In seven weeks’ time, the 37th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück. Today we would like to inform you about the festival’s exhibition, curated by Inga Seidler, which will be on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 26 May 2024.

The exhibition, entitled Feelers, Sensors, explores the possibilities and limitations of sensory perception and the environments it opens up in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The term ‘AI’ refers to the ability of computers to capture and process sensory information in a way that resembles the human perception of the world. The exhibition’s works particularly address questions regarding the role that technology plays, and may play in the future, in the context of perception, experience and the creation of meaning.

Pedro Oliveira’s sound installation opens up a multi-layered, multi-sensorial view of the history of mechanical or technical listening in Germany. In “Crossover/Crosstalk (Version),” the artist combines the features of the Subharchord synthesizer, which was developed in the GDR, with the introduction and use of dialect recognition software. Since 2017, this has been used by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) to verify the origin of undocumented asylum seekers. The voice-trained system is able to recognise languages and accents while classifying and evaluating them according to criteria such as gender, ethnicity, age, or economic status. With the map created in “Crossover/ Crosstalk (Version),” Oliveira illustrates how technological developments can produce forms of violent othering, of discriminatory demarcation, and how they can also harbour possibilities of radical uprooting.

In their series “AI & Me,” Romanian artist duo mots (Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot) playfully explore how AI perceives people, interprets their appearances, and turns them into predictions. How willing are we to voluntarily allow AI to analyse our appearance? The multi-part installation “AI & Me” examines the interaction between artificial intelligence and human participants. At the centre of this experience and installation is “The Confessional”: a booth where participants are viewed by an AI that then provides an analysis of the person based on their appearance. This analysis is displayed in another part of the work, an installation consisting of a large number of monitors in the exhibition space. This is done in real time, just a few minutes after the participants have left “The Confessional.”

The artists featured in the exhibition explore machine perception, but also the human senses and their various forms of perception, as well as the perceptive abilities of plants and animals.

In Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez’s multimedia installation “Night Companions,” visitors can use VR glasses equipped with beetle sensors to experience an augmented reality from the perspective of dung beetles. The artist combines real spatial and virtual experiences of human and non-human perspectives. The narrative point of departure for this mixed reality installation is the behaviour of these dung beetles, which use moonlight or, on moonless nights, the Milky Way to navigate the landscape when not disturbed by urban light pollution or satellites. Through this speculative shift in perspective, “Night Companions” seeks to create awareness and empathy for the disruption of animal navigation systems caused by humans.

The starting point of Rita Macedo’s science fiction eco-dystopia “Farewell recording for an observer of an unknown time and place” is the so-called “Invasive Landscape Phenomenon,” a mysterious, spreading disease. This illness, reminiscent of a dissociative trauma reaction, has developed in a world on the brink of ecological collapse, where first-hand sensory experience has been replaced by a media alternative to physical presence. The narrator’s voice carries the viewer continuously through the unfolding narrative, interweaving essayistic digressions on capitalism, environmental destruction, technological progress, and death.

The exhibition also includes works by Caitlin Berrigan, Erik Bünger, Aay Liparoto, Tanita Olbrich and Lotta Stöver.

We would be delighted if we were able to arouse your interest in this year’s Feelers, Sensors exhibition and are happy to answer any questions or conduct interviews.

For photos of the individual works, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Picture Copyright: EMAF/ Rita Macedo

The 37th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück in around three months. We are pleased to be able to inform you today about the special focus of this year’s EMAF:

In order to orientate ourselves in the world, we connect with it through our feelings and perceptions. We scan it with our senses, thereby adjusting our proximity to and distance from the Other. This year’s thematic focus Feelers, Sensors uses films, installations, sound works, performances, and spoken contributions to explore the role that sensory perception plays regarding the human and non-human experience of the world while also examining how a technologically enhanced sensorium is changing our orientation and interaction in the world.

We are observing an increasing privatisation of space, which also manifests itself in our sensory relationship with the outside, for instance when using noise cancelling to isolate ourselves from disturbing external stimuli. Online communication, as well as “smart” or “sensitive” technologies, are transforming the way we interact with each other through our senses, raising the question as to which forms of inclusion or alienation they promote. At the same time, embodied formats from group meditations to demonstrations can communalise or organise sensory and emotional experiences. What challenge does the sentience of other living beings pose for the human self-image and the responsibility for their habitats? What or who is perceived, publicly seen, or heard is a political question. How can suffering which exceeds the individual’s perceptual capacity or paralyses speech remain communicable? How can we develop more sensitive feelers, and more equitable sensors?

An exhibition and three film programmes are developed around the thematic focus, which will be accompanied and interactively expanded by further live formats such as performances, workshops, and talks intended as spaces for encounters and exchange.

Curators’ statements and bios

Inga Seidler – Exhibition The exhibition explores the possibilities and limits of sensory perception and the environments made accessible by it. Apart from the human senses, it also looks at the perceptual capabilities of plants and animals as well as machine perception. In the context of artificial intelligence, this term refers to the ability of computers to absorb and process sensory information in such a way that it resembles the human perception of the world. The works in the exhibition thus particularly raise questions about the roles that technology plays (or could play) in the context of perception, experience, and sensemaking.

Inga Seidler has been working as a curator in the field of digital culture and media art for many years. Her current activities include exhibitions and programmes for EMAF, Kassel Dokfest, and the Goethe Institute. She is a board member of anorak e. V. and part of several advisory committees and juries.

Jamie Crewe – Film programme In Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) American author, anthropologist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston observes Haitian people mounted by Guedé, a “god of derision”. With their lips Guedé says “tell my horse”, and launches into spectacular invective and behaviour. His horses speak devastating revelations, defame their rulers, prance and gallop, splash their eyes with rum, or leap to their deaths. As channels for their god, they are able to say and do things they could not do unridden. When unable to speak, people or horses—minds or bodies—find other means of expression: no silence can be maintained.

Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head. She grew up in the Peak District, England, and is now settled in Glasgow, Scotland. Jamie thinks about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships, and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.

Oraib Toukan – Film programme Is this really the wonderful Palestinian poet and writer Mahmoud Al Shaer asking: “Is this my mouth saying gas, flour, drinking water, washing water, coffee, biscuits, qasef, zananah, tayarah, tuna, beans, cup, battery, internet, connect, disconnect, oven, fire, yeast, salt, sugar, mattresses, sheets, pillows, carpet?”. To stream pain real-time. Command-Tab. Silence. Feelers, sensors––¬¬––¬¬––– from where in the body should we fathom this? From this earth that makes life worth living, maintained Mahmoud Darwish. “From the hesitance of April, the smell of bread at dawn…the beginning of love, a herb bush on a stone”. This programme foregrounds the heart as a fundamental sensorial organ – an organ whose purpose is to see and to hear. To this aim, works that explore suffering or struggle are combined with works that explore desire. Ultimately, the two are presented as one and the same.

Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer and educator. She is author of the book Sundry Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017), and the films Via Dolorosa (2021), and When Things Occur (2017) among others. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art (2019).

Anna Zett – Film programme Audiovisual media connect points of our own imagination with points in the imagination of other people. The network of perceptions, narratives and symbols created in this way, just like memory, does not represent a realistic image of reality in the individual brain. It is a reality of its own – a form of social dreaming. What role do I play as a spectator, how much freedom am I given to participate in the process of this association? What happens to me at the moment of reception, what do I allow, what do I reject? The programme understands filmmaking and film screening as a participatory, poetic practice, driven by the desire for connection and supported by the conviction that a shared reality is constantly being created anew between individual sensations and perceptions.

Anna Zett is an artist and author. Her analytical and emotional practice questions dominant structures and creates space for open dialogue, personal experience, and free association. This has resulted in films, books, radio plays, installations, and participative live formats, which are shown in an international art context and at festivals.

If you would like to find out more about our festival theme this year, please get in touch. If you wish, we can also provide you with photos of the curators.

At the beginning of the year, we would like to announce a change in the executive team of the European Media Art Festival: Tanja Horstmann will take over the festival’s management on 1 May 2024. Drawing on her many years of experience in the field of festival work, including the Berlinale, as well as project management for organisations such as Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Tanja Horstmann will take over the reins of the EMAF in the coming years and develop it further together with artistic director Katrin Mundt. Horstmann succeeds co-festival director Alfred Rotert, who co-founded the festival a good four decades ago and has helped shape it ever since, and who will be retiring in May.

“We are delighted to have found a suitable successor for Alfred Rotert in Tanja Horstmann. Her extensive festival experience and close ties to independent film culture were highly convincing during the selection process. We are very much looking forward to working with her!” says Katrin Mundt on behalf of the board of the EMAF supporting organisation.

Tanja Horstmann studied film and television studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum. From 2001 she worked for the International Forum of New Cinema and in 2006 she joined the Film Office of the Berlinale. She worked for Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art e.V. in various capacities. From 2007–2022 she supported the Forum section of the Berlinale during the film selection process. Since 2011, she has been responsible as project manager for a variety of film and event series organised at Arsenal, the Zeughauskino at Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin, and the Kulturquartier silent green. Since 2003, she has also been organising the presentation of the women artists’ programme funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, which is presented every two years at the Arsenal cinema.

If you are interested in talking to the new managing director of the EMAF, please get in touch. On request, we can also provide you with a photo of Tanja Horstmann.

Media artists from all over the world can submit their works now for the European Media Art Festival 2024. The online platform https://emaf.filmchief.com/entry-forms is now open.

Works from the areas of Film, Installation and Expanded (live projects such as performances, interactive works, or workshops) can be submitted. The deadline for submissions is 7 January 2024. A selection committee together with a team of curators will compile programme entries for the upcoming festival from the submitted works.

Submission of work is free of charge. Artists’ fees will be paid for all entries selected for the festival.

The 37th European Media Art Festival will take place from 24-28 April 2024. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will also be on view until 26 May 2024.

About the festival: The EMAF is internationally regarded as one of the most influential forums for media art. Every year it offers its visitors an overview of current artistic productions in film programmes, exhibitions, performances, and hybrid formats. Guest-curated projects, retrospectives and talks provide in-depth insights into historical positions and contexts. The EMAF is a meeting place for artists, curators, researchers, students, as well as film and art enthusiasts from all over the world.

After five days of the 36th European Media Art Festival (EMAF), the prizes were awarded on Sunday in Osnabrück’s Lagerhalle. The EMAF Award (endowed with 3,000 euros) for a trend-setting contribution to media art was awarded to Tulapop Saenjaroen for the work Mangosteen. The Dialogue Award (endowed with 2,000 euros) for the promotion of intercultural exchange was given to Peng Zuqiang for Sight Leak. Living Room under the Flyover by Karolina Breguła received the Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (VDFK) (endowed with 2,000 euros).

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Prize were awarded by an international jury of media artists and curators. This year’s jury consisted of Greg de Cuir Jr, Jeannette Muñoz and Maryam Tafakory. The film critics Rainer Bellenbaum, Bettina Hirsch and Luca Schepers formed the jury for the EMAF Media Art Prize of the VDFK.

“Mangosteen by Tulapop Saenjaroen is about a surrealist narrative dreamscape that does a masterful job of bringing together archetypes, character, music, and humour. This is clearly the work of a talented director in command of his craft,” judged the jury of the EMAF Award.

Kevin Jerome Everson’s If You Don’t Watch the Way You Move was also honoured with a special jury award.

The Dialogue Award was given to Peng Zuqiang’s Sight Leak for the “sensitive utilisation of the camera tracing a journey through an urban landscape, and for the way the voices perform and comment upon the text. The film contrasts and critiques the western philosophical imaginary with eastern queer realities,” so the jury.

The jury gave a special award in this category to Gautam Valluri for ul-Umra.

Living Room under the Flyover, a joint project by Karolina Breguła, Shi-Fen Zhang, Rong-Yu Li and Ya-Qiao Li, impressed the the jury of the EMAF Media Art Award of the VDFK “with its cinematographically sensitive portrayal of a political protest against housing displacement in Taiwan. In reference to the staging and performance of a precarious housing situation under the highway bridge in Tainan’s railway station district, the film skilfully combines well-composed visual settings that alternate between static photography and subtle momentum. As the film puts the audience in the position of detecting and examining movement or standstill, it is ultimately a reflection of the endurance that finally led to the partial success of the political resistance.”

The VDFK jury awarded a special prize to Anna Zett for Afraid Doesn´t Exist.

The exhibition of the 36th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) will be on display at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 29 May.

We would like to thank the numerous visitors for their interest and look forward to seeing you all again next year!

If you need film stills or pictures of the award winners and juries, please send an email to presse@emaf.de

A week before the festival begins, the organisers of the 36th European Media Art Festival presented the programme in Osnabrück today.

More than 70 films will be screened at the Osnabrück Lagerhalle and the Filmtheater Hasetor from 19 to 23 April. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück includes eleven works. The EMAF Talks comprise four panels with a total of seven speakers. In addition, there is the EMAF Campus, featuring works by students from five universities.

The selection committee and the curators received more than 3,000 submissions – the highest number ever.

For the first time since the outbreak of the Corona pandemic three years ago, the festival will again be held exclusively to a live audience. “We want to send a signal that festivals offer a platform for an on-site exchange with artists that is so unique,” says festival director Alfred Rotert.

“Trembling Time” is the theme of the EMAF 2023. Even though it is currently more topical than ever due to the multiple crises in the world – the decision for this theme was triggered by the 375th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia in the city of Osnabrück. “What does it mean to set a historical point and distinguish a “before” and “after” on a timeline? How can time be thought differently? This has fundamentally shaped our reflections,” says Katrin Mundt, festival director and curator of the film programmes. Time concepts of other cultures will also be considered, while looking at everyday experiences where time is perceived as a rupture and discontinuity.

The film programme of the festival consists of 70 films altogether. In the competition, 24 films from 19 countries are competing for one of the three prizes that will be awarded at the festival on Sunday, 23 April. The filmmakers focus, among other things, on family relationships; many artists refer to their own biographies and those of their families of origin. One example is Anna Zett’s “Es gibt keine Angst” (“There is no fear”). Based on her own history, she uses audio and video material from the Berlin archive of the GDR opposition to collage an act of political self-empowerment at the end of the GDR that is hardly known today.

Furthermore, the thematic programme “Trembling Time” curated by Rachael Rakes will be screened. In five programmes and a performance, she addresses the notion of a linear progression of time and the Western progressive thinking that encourages the exploitation of human and natural resources, as well as conscious acts of withdrawal from or resistance to a strictly clocked time.

In the category “Artist in Focus”, the EMAF will this year honour the work of the internationally renowned film, installation, and sound artist Angela Melitopoulos. In addition to a selection of her film works from the 1980s to the present day, the artist will present other films by artists who have influenced her work. These include Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and works by feminist film collectives of the 1970s.

In the exhibition of the European Media Art Festival at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, eleven positions by nine artists will be on display from next Wednesday – including expansive installations and sculptures as well as interactive VR works and sound installations. The exhibition was curated by Inga Seidler. One example she refers to is the sound sculpture “Decay” by Martin Recker and Paul Hauptmeier. It deals with radioactive decay processes and extreme periods of time that are completely beyond our human imagination.

Curator Daphne Dragona has chosen “degrowth” as the focus of the EMAF Talks – in contrast to hyperproduction and overconsumption, it’s about alternative forms and the end of seemingly limitless growth. Kris de Decker, editor of the magazine “Lowtech”, is one of seven speakers who will talk at the four panels.

This year’s guests at the EMAF Campus include students from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz as well as from Osnabrück University and Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. They too are dealing with a time of upheaval. The film class of the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz is working on the history and the presence of the Hasetor film theatre. The students already filmed in the traditional Osnabrück cinema a few weeks ago. The outcome will be screened at the EMAF next week under the title “The Best Remaining Seats.”

The EMAF Campus remains a central element of this year’s EMAF, which has been inviting selected classes to create their own exhibitions and programmes for several years. “We want to give as many young students as possible the chance to show their work to an international audience. And this is also reflected in the number of accredited guests: specially in the university sector, we are seeing an increase. They are already planning excursions to the festival at an early stage, which of course makes us particularly happy,” say the two festival directors Katrin Mundt and Alfred Rotert.

You can find the entire EMAF programme on the internet at www.emaf.de. The press tour of the exhibition will take place next Tuesday at 1 pm.

We look forward to seeing you at the festival and invite you to join us for the opening at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück next Wednesday at 7.30 pm!

In two weeks the 36th European Media Art Festival will start in Osnabrück. Today we would like to inform you about the program of the “Campus” section.

This year’s EMAF Campus is being organised by art academy classes from Leipzig, Munich, and Mainz as well as by Osnabrück University and Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. In exhibitions, film screenings, and workshops developed specifically for the festival, they will present current projects – from video and audio installations to kinetic objects and collectively created films.

Under the title Patching Networks, the class for Image and Space Politics of the Academy of Fine Arts Munich will address different natural and social ecologies – the fragile connections between bodies and spaces, subject and community.

In Sorry, I Have to Leave, the class Expanded Cinema from the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig explores movements of time and moments of transition as they become visible in places of remembrance and (re)preservation, as well as in gestures of solidarity and resistance.

The film class of the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz is developing a new, collective film project for the Filmtheater Hasetor. The Best Remaining Seats not only activates this particular cinema and its history, but also explores what cinema (today) means as a shared realm of experience.

Students from Osnabrück University, the University of Applied Sciences Osnabrück and the School of Music and Art are participating with video projects, workshops, and installations. Whether they are exploring artistic immersion as “artronauts” in times of change and progression, inventing new solutions for dealing with digital media, or whether they are exploring local green spaces as a way of preserving hope for a liveable future - the students of the three institutions are presenting a wide variety of works that will be shown and exhibited at various locations in Osnabrück’s city centre.

For free press accreditation please write an e-mail to presse@emaf.de.

In three weeks the 36 th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück. One of the sections of the festival are the talks: four panels with a total of seven experts.

Wishing to disconnect time from linearity, productivity and progress, the talks of EMAF 2023 curated by Daphne Dragona explore time with regard to the temporalities and rhythms of different worlds. Paradigms of degrowth come tothe foreground shedding light to the possibilities and challenges of scaling down human activity and its impact. The ideas, proposals and projects discussed underline the urge to respect the limits of the planet and to acknowledge dependencies on a social and ecological level.

Within this context, a particular emphasis is placed on the role of technology looking into its controversies in making, taking, or wasting time and in shaping futures. Examples of low-tech, traditional or community knowledge are introduced as models for a more sustainable way of living. Initiatives and institutions that aim and advocate for behavioural and systemic change are discussed paying attention to their programme with regard to the use of energy, resources and time.

Although turning back time is not possible, the potential to let go of the imaginary of progress, to slow down and to change pace is still a viable option. The speakers of EMAF 2023 embrace such possibilities examining how it can happen from individual to collective and from community to society.

The panels

If we can understand time as something to be passed or wasted or killed, rather than saved and spent, we might move away from the drug of liveness that digital capitalism uses to bind us to its rhythms - That’s what Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy, or Living with Dead Time is all about.

What is considered today as low-tech and what can slow practices bring to a time of hyper-productivity and overconsuption? What does it take to change pace and what are the costs? How can art, design and technology contribute to building a more sustainable society? Kris de Decker and Hypercomf, the speakers of the panel Going Low-tech/ Designing Self-sufficiency, will respond to such questions with examples from their own artistic practice and way of living.

As part of the panel Planetary metabolism & temporalities of environmental change, two artists and researchers will present recent works of theirs and exchange their thoughts about the costs of technological progress on Earth’s species and ecosystems. Karolina Sobecka will address the phenomenon of the ‘tar pits’, which are natural substances made of thick oil, able to reveal fossils once trapped in them, and to manifest different temporalities of life and matter. Joana Moll will discuss the augmentation of the anthropogenic mass with regard to the biomass, its negative effects on the biosphere and the possibility to regenerate itself.

Powering Degrowth is one of the titles of another panel. Is degrowth an option for today’s world? Which institutions and infrastructures can assist in such a shift and process? Where can paradigms of relevance be found, andwhat can be learned from them? Speakers connected to exemplary initiatives in Germany will position themselves on the topic drawing from their own practice. With contributions by Florine Lindner, Muerbe u. Droege and Andrea Vetter.

Upon request, we will be happy to provide you with visual material on the individual works and invite you to continue reporting on the preparations for the EMAF and to visit the festival in Osnabrück in April.

The film programmes of this year’s EMAF will once again provide a broad overview of international experimental filmmaking – from current short and feature-length films to historical works, audiovisual performances and expanded cinema. Numerous artists will be attending the festival in person to present their contributions and discuss them with the audience. There will be 70 films and film performances from a total of 32 countries.

Current selection

Central to the film programmes is the International Competition. This year, the short and medium-length films thematically focus on the examination of family relationships, intimacy and domesticity, the traumas of displacement and uprooting, and artistic time travel between the past and the future. How does one experience and overcome the reality of state borders and social divisions? What is made possible by solidarity and resistance? How do our memories live on, how do we imagine something new through technology, dreams and ritual?

Video and audio material from the archive of the GDR opposition forms the basis for Anna Zett’s film Es gibt keine Angst (DE 2023). Using a pulsating collage of underground music, poetry, private and journalistic recordings, she embarks on an emotional and intellectual approach to experiences of violence and political self-empowerment. Mangrove School by Filipa César & Sónia Vaz Borges (PT/DE/FR 2022) is part of a long-term artistic research into the history of decolonial resistance in Guinea Bissau and its present afterlife. In atmospherically dense images, the film reconstructs how one lived and learned together in the historical guerrilla schools of the mangrove forests.

In James Richards’ video Qualities of Life: Living in the Radiant Cold (DE 2022), still-life shots of his own and other people’s living spaces, of bodies and infrastructures are combined with fragments taken from musical scores to create an evocative image of a present in a permanent state of suspension. Peng Zuqiang’s Sight Leak (CN 2022) also navigates the border between intimate interior and anonymous exterior spaces. Loosely based on Roland Barthes’ writings on China and their homoerotic subtext, in this work a flâneur moves through public spaces thinking about the gazes and desires that are encountered here, hinted at, denied, and mirrored. In her experimental road movie Selfish Road (UK/DE 2022), Oreet Ashery follows the infrastructures of separation and delusion, memory and connection through a politically fractured landscape.

The four current feature-length films in the programme also convey multi-layered impressions of landscapes in transition, contested geographies and overlapping times. Sophio Medoidze’s documentary feature debut Let Us Flow (GE/UK 2022) observes the changes caused by modernisation and migration processes in the remote Georgian mountain region of Tusheti and the importance of traditional rituals that create collective bonds while also reinforcing social exclusions.

In Schlachthäuser der Moderne (DE 2022), Heinz Emigholz focuses on the work of two South American architects: Francisco Salamone, whose works of the 1930s are committed to the spirit of a fascist-futurist modernism, and Freddy Mamani Silvestre, whose projects radically resist the dictates of Western modernism. Ultimately, they form the background for an interrogation of the Berlin Palace (“Berliner Stadtschloss”) and its position between experiment and restoration.

Artist in Focus: Angela Melitopoulos

This year, EMAF honours the artist Angela Melitopoulos as Artist in Focus. Since the mid-1980s, she has been creating videos, installations and sound works, also in cooperation with other artists, theorists and activist networks. EMAF presents a selection of her works, from early experimental and activist videos to recent documentary films. They portray movements through the landscapes of the Anthropocene (Matrilinear B – Surfacing Earth, 2020), follow the traces of a migration experience perpetuated over generations (Passing Drama, 1999), or illuminate the entanglements of technology, modern subjectivity and animism (The Life of Particles, 2012). In dialogue with Melitopoulos’ work, there will also be films by other artists specially selected by her, including Alain Resnais, Irit Batsry, Joyce Wieland, Helke Sander and the Newsreel Collective.

Expanded Cinema: Spect

At the interface of film and performance, EMAF is carrying out a new, multi-year project in cooperation with the artist collective LaborBerlin. Under the title Spectral: Unburdened Recollections, historical and rarely shown expanded cinema works and film performances will be reconstructed and reperformed at the festival. Discussions with the participating artists and curators will address how these ephemeral works of art can be preserved and made available now and in the future. This year’s programme opens with two Super 8 performances by Argentinian filmmaker Claudio Caldini (curated by Federico Windhausen) and an expanded 35mm work by Spanish experimental film pioneer José Val del Omar (curated by Esperanza Collado).

Film Programme “Trembling Time“

Another highlight is the six-part film and performance programme curated by Rachael Rakes on the festival theme Trembling Time. Based on the assumption that the idea of a linear progression of time, which to this day determines our thinking and perception, our economic and political actions, is a construct, and one that potentially threatens our very existence, the works in this programme deal with alternative concepts of time and values. On view are films by Minh Quý Trương, Maxime Jean Baptiste, Seba Calfuqueo & Roberto Riveros aka Neo Cristo, Onyeka Igwe, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES and a performance by Aura Satz, among others.

The exhibition of this year’s European Media Art Festival (EMAF) “Trembling Time”, which will be on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück from 19 April to 29 May, explores various concepts of time and temporality.

Human existence is fundamentally shaped by the categories of space and time, whereby time is hardly tangible, difficult to define and to grasp. It presents itself as anything but absolute or objective. Concepts of time – and how we develop it, perceive it, measure it, deal with it, think about it, discuss, and change it – depend on how a society is structured. People perceive time as different temporalities depending on the context, it is extremely mouldable within human experience.

The abstract, quantitative perception of time that shapes our (working) everyday life and rhythm of life, nowadays forced by digital technologies, is historically a very limited facet of human experience. Behind this linearly conceived time, in which one leaves the past behind and moves into a changed or changeable future, we find the narratives about the progress of colonialism or capitalistically organised societies. This linear understanding of time classifies groups according to their cultural differences, from progressive to backward, thus legitimising colonial interventions with the goal of “civilisation”.

The artists chosen for the exhibition by curator Inga Seidler explore the multi-layered nature of time and invite us to draw our attention to alternative dimensions of time beyond an understanding of linear time, such as inner time, biological time, or the deep geological times of the earth. Alone, the realities of climate crisis or radioactive waste force us to think of time on a completely different scale. The deep time of such phenomena, or of geological and planetary phenomena in general, exceeds the time scale of humans or even the entire human species.

Eva van Tongeren’s multimedia installation In the Belly of the City (2022) explores a whale cemetery that spreads out beneath the urban landscape of Antwerp, where its inhabitants now work, live, play, talk and rest. The videos follow paleontologist Mark Bosselaers as he examines the whale bones of Antwerp. By arranging the bones according to place and time, he tries to uncover the origin of the world as we know it today. And in the process, he comes into contact with his own mortality.

Tang Han’s video work Ginkgo and Other Times (2022) focuses on the ginkgo, a living fossil that has been around for 200 million years. The artist explores the cultural-historical relationship between the ginkgo tree and humans considering the temporality of the ginkgo in relation to that of other living beings.

While some works address different temporalities beyond the human perception, measurement and existence, other artworks turn to the relationships between past, present and future, as well as the methods of storytelling, assembling, remembering, and archiving. In doing so, they also turn their gaze to experimental languages of cultural production and dissemination, as well as to the alternative histories and spaces of possibility that the archive can offer.

Thomas Mader’s installation all heat and no light (2022) focuses on the longevity of communicative text/image strategies through leaflets, propaganda and meme formats. It creates timelines between objects and events in relation to their shared fundamental, historical and linguistic connections. Specifically, it looks at the appropriation of the figure of the Pink Panther by the NSU, the politicisation of the Ensisheim meteorite by King Maximilian I (1492), and the ongoing struggle over certain meme formats between the far-right and far-left creation of digital image content.

With Do You Remember Sarajevo – Multitude (2021), Clarissa Thieme and Nihad Kreševljaković reflect on the potential of archives in terms of personal and collective histories beyond prevailing conventions that frequently lead to erasure and one-sidedness. In an experimental setting, they allow the audience to encounter and engage with the archival material of the library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv Sarajevo, a private collection of amateur videos filmed by a group of friends in besieged Sarajevo. Thirty years after the beginning of the Bosnian war, new political urgencies arise from issues of self-representation, historical revisionism and the relativisation of violence not only in the region of the former Yugoslavia.

Upon request, we will be happy to provide you with visual material on the individual works and invite you to continue reporting on the preparations for the EMAF and to visit the festival in Osnabrück in April.

We are pleased to inform you today about the topic of this year’s European Media Art Festival, which will take place from April 19th to 23rd in Osnabrück.

The Call for Entries ended last Sunday. The number of works submitted from the fields of film, installation and expanded media was overwhelming! Overall 3000 works were submitted for the selection committee and curators to review — thanks a lot for this!

EMAF´s theme 2023 is “Trembling Time” - a time in turmoil, whose momentum is diffuse and undirected but widely felt, in which the possible end of something may be suggested as well as the emergence of something new.

The motto of the EMAF 2023 does not primarily stand for a moment of crisis - even if we are currently experiencing at firsthand how the time frame in which the global climate catastrophe could still be averted is visibly narrowing; how global wars and conflicts are having an impact right down to our local and very personal contexts and are being prolonged for their victims in the traumatic temporality of flight and migration. This is also about an understanding of time that is becoming increasingly questionable: a temporality that is oriented towards historical fixed and turning points, and the abstract rhythms that clock our post-industrial contemporary world. With “Trembling Time”, the EMAF invites us - in its exhibition, film programmes, lectures and performances - to revise our ideas of temporality and history, to confront them with other forms of remembering, imagining and being-in-the-world, and thus also to experience the trembling of time as a movement that, by throwing relations into disorder and shaking up hierarchies, opens up new paths for us.

In the exhibition for the festival, curated by Inga Seidler, our understanding of time will be challenged. The artists on display will look at alternative histories and ideas of the future beyond the idea of progress. In doing so, their observations, narratives or deconstructions take place in the context of time and its perception against the backdrop of a global climate and environmental crisis, which at the same time represents a moment that evokes the image of the passage of time.

Curated by Rachael Rakes, the film programme takes on the idea of “Trembling Time” by merging temporal revisionisms and projections. With the observation that progressive time is a construct, and potentially a terminally dangerous one at that, the works in this programme engage with and demonstrate various alternate time and value forms. These include anti-chronologies, re- and pre-enactments, ways of making life in imperial ruins, non-narrative enunciations of reality, and infrastructures of non-human non-linear relations.

What changes when the only way left to move forward is to slow down? The talks programme, curated by Daphne Dragona, will focus on models of (de)growth that respect the needs and rhythms of different worlds. Theorists and practitioners will discuss the problematics of progress in relation to zones of sacrifice and will shed light on approaches that invite people to actively change habits and pace. Within this context, the role of the art world itself will also be addressed, bringing to the foreground different paradigms with regard to the use of energy and time, to forms of cultural production and attendance.

The curators

Inga Seidler lives and works as a curator and cultural producer in Berlin. In recent years, she has developed, produced and curated exhibitions, performances, discourse programmes and digital projects. Within the group Collective Practices she initiated the projects, which dealt with questions of collective knowledge production and cultural creation in response to new technologies. Inga Seidler has been a member of several committees for Artist in Residency programmes and cultural institutions and is a jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds. Since 2020 she is curating the exhibition programmes of the European Media Art Festival at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Rachael Rakes (Amsterdam/New York) is the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, and was recently the Curator of Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2019-2022), and the Head Curator and Manager for the Curatorial Programme at De Appel, Amsterdam (2017-2019). Rakes is a committee member for the New York Film Festival Currents section, and a contributing editor for Infrasonica. She recently co-edited the anthologies Toward the Not-Yet: Art as Public Practice (2021, MIT), and Practice Space (2019, NAME/De Appel). With artists Onyeka Igwe and Laura Huertas Millán, she organises the research and curatorial collective Counter Encounters. Daphne Dragona is a curator and writer based in Berlin. In her current work, she addresses the promises of degrowth for art and culture, and the role of technology in times of climate crisis. Her exhibitions have been hosted at Onassis Stegi, Laboral, EMST, Akademie Schloss Solitude and other institutions. Articles of hers have been published in various books by the likes of Springer, Sternberg Press, and Leonardo Electronic
Almanac. Dragona was a curator of the transmediale festival between 2015-2019. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens.

If you would like to receive portraits of the curators, please contact us. We are also at your disposal for other questions and interviews.

Media artists from all over the world can now submit their work to be selected for the European Media Art Festival 2023. The online platform at registration.emaf.de is now open. Works from the areas of film, installation, performance and expanded media can be submitted. The deadline for submissions is 8 January 2023. A selection committee and a team of curators will compile programme contributions for the upcoming festival from the submitted works.

The submission of works is free of charge. Artists’ fees will be paid for all contributions selected for the festival.

The 36th European Media Art Festival will take place from 19 to 23 April 2023. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue until 29 May 2023.

About the Festival: The EMAF is internationally regarded as one of the most influential forums for contemporary media art. Every year it offers its visitors an overview of current artistic productions through film programmes, exhibitions, performances and hybrid formats. Guest-curated projects and retrospectives provide in-depth insights into historical positions and contexts. Every year, around 14,000 international artists, curators, researchers, students and people interested in film and art meet at the EMAF.

“The thing is opened!” With these words from State Secretary Dr Jörg Mielke, Head of the Lower Saxony State Chancellery , the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) was successfully opened at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück yesterday. Under the festival theme The thing is, the world of things and its complex relationship to humans are the focus of numerous media art installations at various Osnabrück venues and in over 120 films from more than 30 countries, on show through this Sunday in the Lagerhalle Osnabrück and at Filmtheater Hasetor. The EMAF exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück is open to visitors until 29 May.

Emphasizing the special significance of this year’s on-site festival, alongside the festival directors Katrin Mundt and Alfred Rotert, were Dr Tabea Golgath, Art and Museums Advisor of the Stiftung Niedersachsen, and Volker Bajus, Representative of the Mayor of the City of Osnabrück, considering that EMAF had to be held online for two years in a row due to the pandemic. The over 600 visitors in attendance were greeted at the opening by Anna Jehle and Juliane Schickedanz, Directors of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Also opened yesterday were three other exhibitions of the festival section EMAF Campus in the Kunsthalle’s new building, in the art space hase29, and in the Haus der Jugend. During the festival, which runs through 24 April, further exhibitions, media art performances, EMAF talks with international activists and experts, and numerous film programmes can be experienced. Details on the full range of activities are available in the festival timetable at: Timetable.

35th European Media Art Festival will come to a close on Sunday, 24 April, with the Awards Ceremony at 5:30 p.m. in the Lagerhalle Osnabrück. Three groundbreaking works of media art will be honoured with jury prizes.

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) extends warm thanks to its funders, especially to nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Sievert Stiftung für Wissenschaft und Kultur, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

Classes and subject groups at European academies and universities are presenting their current work in the festival section ‘EMAF Campus’ as part of the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF), held from 20 to 24 April at venues in Osnabrück and in certain cases online as well. Students from Vienna, Amsterdam, Halle an der Saale, Braunschweig, Bremen, and Osnabrück will be enlivening the festival cinemas and different sites in Osnabrück’s city centre both with their own film programmes and with a variety of exhibitions.

The programme AMATEURINNEN* (AMATEURS*) arose from collaboration between the Austrian Film Museum and the Department of Art and Digital Media at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. On show are student-made films that explore the feminist political potential of works found in the inventory of the Austrian Film Museum. In the new study programme focused on Artistic Research in and through Cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy in Amsterdam, a focus is placed on research and debate, experimentation and processes: students present works dealing with personal memories, relations between the individual and the collective, and the dynamics of shifting perspectives. The Campus film programmes will be presented at the Filmtheater Hasetor.

The specialist Time-based Arts class at the Burg Giebichenstein in Halle uses various means and media to translate thoughts and content into narrative and experimental films and projects, sounds, built and media-situated spaces, bodies and movement, the material and the immaterial, developing a unique artistic language and approach in the process. The exhibition will be shown in the Neubau of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

At the heart of the Spatial Concepts class at Braunschweig University of Art is a political approach that is experimental at the very same time. The students enter a past archive with a sensory gaze, return to the political present with a critical view to the future, and create a speaking space of contemporary reflection. In addition to their exhibition at hase29, the students from Braunschweig are offering something special called #smalltalks on the EMAF website: during the festival, they will be talking about their work every day live online.

The class for Time-based Arts at the University of the Arts Bremen is exhibiting their work at the Haus der Jugend with an exploration of a world overwhelmed by visual and acoustic stimuli, while also exposing content factories and conceiving time as a fragile medium that gives rise to echo chambers. Moreover, the Institute of Art/Art Education at University of Osnabrück is participating with several works. In a robotics workshop featuring a telepresence robot called Double, for instance, new communication and exhibition concepts are devised. Also, in a project researching sound, a multichannel installation has been created for the former Wöhrl Parkhaus, interweaving various acoustic works into a collective space of resonance.

The detailed programme of the festival section ‘EMAF Campus’, with information about all exhibition sites and dates, can be found at the Timetable

We warmly invite you to our opening on 20 April at 7:30 pm at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. We would also like to refer you to our Award Ceremony, which will take place on Sunday 24 April at 5:30 pm in the Lagerhalle Osnabrück.

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) expresses its gratitude to its sponsors, in particular to nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Sievert Foundation for science an culture, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

A total of 110 films from 31 countries will be presented by the 34th European Media Art Festival in this year’s programme, titled “Possessed”. However, in view of rising infection figures and considerable travel restrictions for our international participants and guests, the film programmes will be held as an online-only event. The exhibitions in the Kunsthalle and other venues will be set up as planned and, depending on circumstances, will also be open to the public.

The streaming offer will be online from 21 April - 2 May and will include conversations with artists, live talks and insights into the exhibitions, in addition to the film programmes. “As soon as public screenings are possible, we will present a number of films once again in physical form,” says Katrin Mundt, member of the EMAF management team.

With over 2,600 submissions, more artists than ever before applied for inclusion in the EMAF programme; 31 films were selected for the competition. “Many of these films deal with landscapes marked by the traces of historical occupations or current conflicts,” says Katrin Mundt, who is in charge of the film programme. “The artists’ stance can be very critical, but also very personal. And often they are looking for alternatives: for other models of the world and new forms of community life.” Marwa Arsanios’ Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 3: Micro-Resistances (2020), for example, tells of the struggle for land and mineral resources in Colombia and the empowerment of indigenous women through the dissemination of ecological knowledge. Simon Liu’s Happy Valley (2020) combines traces of the protests in his home city of Hong Kong into a melancholic tour through a city in the process of disappearing. He works with images and sounds that seem like distant memories.

Other works revolve around the close connection between body, place and identity. In Daddy’s Boy (2020), Renèe Helèna Browne examines the role of father figures in finding one’s own identity. The Hollywood classic Jurassic Park provides Browne with arguments for a different, “monstrous” way of being in the world. And Marian Mayland’s Michael Ironside and I (2020) also searches the film sets of 1980s and 90s sci-fi productions for notions of a technologically expanded masculinity that materialise in them.

Sharing and passing on experience, communicating across cultural boundaries and geographical distances is another focus of the competition. For instance, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2021) is the result of a collaboration between the artist Ana Vaz and two students from Lisbon, Vera Amaral and Mário Neto. Their film asks fundamental questions about how we make sense of the world by seeing and filming, and how we locate ourselves in relation to others. In Three Works for Piano (2020), Dani Gal combines two very different narrative levels: three piano performances and the account of a former soldier in the Israeli army. Both illuminate different dimensions of speaking and silence, of memory and stage-setting.

The festival theme “Possessed” is spotlighted by a series curated by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy (Berlin). Titled “The Unpossessable Possessor”, it focuses on the cinematic apparatus: how is it connected to us humans, how it takes possession of us - be it as a machine that mediates between us and reality, as a producer of a quasi-ritual immersion or as an adversary whose control over us has to be artfully undermined? “The originally planned analogue film projections and performances will initially be moved to digital space in excerpts. We hope to be able to present the complete programme later in the year,” explains Katrin Mundt. With works by Eva C. Heldmann, Zelimir Zilnik, Amy Halpern, Ruy Guerra, Alee Peoples & Mike Stoltz and others.

Artist and curator Nour Ouayda (Beirut) presents a series on the history and present of video art in Lebanon. In Show Us the Money and We Will Resist, she traces the role that the resources and networks of Lebanese television played in the development of video art in the 1990s, and what new media infrastructures have taken their place to enable both artistic experimentation and intervention in society. With works by Akram Zaatari, Mohamed Soueid, Chantal Partamian, Lara Tabet and others.

With The New Death, the EMAF is resuming a programme that was produced for the last edition but could not be shown due to the festival’s cancellation at short notice: Artists Jaakko Pallasvuo (Helsinki) and Steve Reinke (Chicago) have selected films from the 1920s to the present day that propose alternative perspectives on the conventional dualism of life and death. With works by Leslie Thornton, Moyra Davey, Onyeka Igwe, Andrew Norman Wilson and others.

We warmly invite you to cover our Film Section, and hope you can join us in person at the 34th European Media Art Festival!

The 34th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück in a few weeks. We are pleased to inform you today about the installations that will be on view from 21 April to 30 May at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück and other exhibition venues in the city. The exhibition, entitled “possessed”, is curated by Berlin curator Inga Seidler.

The exhibition thus takes up the theme of the 34th edition of the European Media Art Festival and - in keeping with the double meaning of the word “possessed” in its German translation - moves in the field of tension between the concepts of possession and obsession. The works on display address colonial and capitalist contexts of domination, control, ownership and property in a variety of ways. Particular attention is paid to the role of technologies. At the same time, the media art works counter them with new, alternative and indigenous visions of interaction and ownership.

The setting of the exhibition in the nave of the former Dominican Church creates aesthetically charged contrasts with the works on display: For instance, the altar-like video installation “Madre Drone” by the Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez fuses myths, symbols and rituals with images of extraction and indigenous land rights, cultural appropriation and the destruction of nature through industrialisation. Domínguez’s works aim to “exorcise the effects of late capitalism and ecological destruction in the physical and social body”. At the same time, she explores the emancipatory potential of the artistic imagination as a form of psychological emancipation and a way of healing our colonial trauma.

Nora Al Badri’s work, entitled “Babylonian Vision”, interrogates contemporary museum practices by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate synthetic Babylonian objects based on antiquities. “The resulting images of this techno-heritage are thus used as a means of reclaiming cultural datasets from the possession of Western museum collections,” explains EMAF curator Inga Seidler.

What it means to have no history and thus no future culminates in the video “Motlhaba Wa Re KeNamile”, which Lerato Shadi shot in her hometown Lotlhakane (Botswana): The work is reminiscent of the so-called slave masks that white slave owners put over the heads of their dehumanised workers to prevent them from swallowing soil and thus committing suicide — as a last gesture of resistance.

Pedro Neves Marquez examines histories of colonisation through the lens of biotechnology, pointing out how closely the colonisation of peoples is linked to the colonisation of land and to control over biological reproduction as a whole. In “YWY, the Android”, a female indigenous android, who we learn is a field worker, talks to a GMO corn plant about bodily rights, infertility, labour and monoculture. As a human, the viewer is unable to hear the voice of the maize and therefore perceives the dialogue as a strange monologue.

Vladan Joler explores and visualises a range of technical and social aspects of contemporary phenomena at the intersection of technology and society. His large-scale map of new extractivism presents old with new forms of colonialism and extractivism and reminds us how capitalism organises what is termed nature by discussing ongoing forms of exploitation between cultures, populations, countries and territories.

One of the theses that artist Johannes Paul Raether works with in the guise of “Protektorama, the World Healing Witch”, is that humanity, obsessed with the principles of capital, is mutating into a prosthetic of its own digital devices. With the world-healing forest, “Protektorama” constructs a ritual setting where we can separate ourselves from our smartphone fetish through de-rationalisation and communication via the senses.

We look forward to welcoming you to the opening of this year’s EMAF exhibition “possessed” on 21 April 2021 at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. However, we cannot currently guarantee under which conditions a visit in person to the exhibition and the festival will be possible under the Corona guidelines in force at the end of April. We are therefore also preparing online formats that will enable a virtual visit to the exhibition. Up-to-date information on this will be published on our website.