When witnesses of violence and injustice go unheard, where are the things that happened registered, where are they stored? How can testimonies write stories that have not yet been written and break the power of a systematic lack of knowledge that secures privileges within society? These are the questions that the Talks at this year’s European Media Art Festival will be addressing. Today we would like to introduce you to the programme.

Bearing witness is itself caught up in epistemic violence: I only see what I know, recognise, have learnt to recognise. Taking the National Socialist Underground complex as its starting point, Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment (2023) describes collective ignorance as the basis of structural racism and contrasts this with the self-assertion of migrant-situated experience and memory. The title of this year’s Talks I could swear my face was touching stone picks up on the affective aspects of testimony. It is taken from the poetry collection Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Brand’s poetry has repeatedly engaged with the question of bearing witness, with the gap between what is inflicted and what of that is reported. Before this backdrop, the four events are dedicated to the transhistorical dimensions of witnessing as well as corporeal and sensorial forms of knowledge, with those taking part linking together short presentations, conversations, readings and films.

The Talks are curated and moderated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst.

Technologies

Film scholars Anaïs Farine (Beirut) and Irit Neidhardt (Berlin) look at the shifting contexts of images and sounds from and about Palestine. They examine how solidarity with the Palestinian cause institutionalised through cinema has largely disappeared in present-day Germany, and identify current artistic and curatorial interventions in a field where technologies of making visible easily tend to have obverse effects. The conversation is accompanied by a wide range of audiovisual materials – from films made by West German film crews, commissioned by the PLO, to recent experimental films utilising found footage from colonised Palestine in the early 20th century, and the 2024 short film compilation made in Gaza, From Ground Zero.

Magic

Listening to the voices of the oppressed often requires us to enter unmastered territory characterised by defiant magical happenings and unexpected fantastical imaginaries. Author and philologist Sanabel Abdel Rahman (Tunis) and artist and researcher Ashkan Sepahvand (London) speak of witnesses who disrupt colonial reality through magic and storytelling. Abdel Rahman, who will join online from Tunis, shares aspects of her research on magical realism and haunting as part of Palestinian resistance, while Sepahvand focuses on figures of alterity emerging in modern Iran under geopolitical ruination.

Continuities

At EMAF in April 2024, legal and islamic studies scholar Nahed Samour and artist Pary El-Qalqili took account of the repression and silencing of voices in Germany expressing solidarity with Palestine. One year later, Nahed Samour (Berlin) looks at where we are now: What to call the current societal condition? Has it already become permanent? In another chronicling, Frankfurt-based artist Anita Di Bianco’s ongoing project Corrections and Clarifications compiles daily retractions, re-wordings, distinctions and apologies to print news since September 1, 2001. Moving chronologically backwards from the present, Di Bianco suggests that the notion of historical ruptures is itself part of the misrepresentation and distortion.

Bodies

Author and curator José B. Segebre (Berlin) will reflect on the aesthetics of waiting in queer, feminist, Black and decolonial artistic practice. He will foreground waiting as a central dimension of sumud (steadfastness), a practice of resistance that defines Palestinian daily life, both inside and outside historic Palestine. Ashkan Sepahvand will address performances and rituals of death in the context of the AIDS pandemic, which arose in the 1980s and continues in the present, focusing both on the historical transmission of knowledge between queer dancers and choreographers and on the theater of director Reza Abdoh, whose work cites the Iranian-Islamic performance tradition of ta’ziyeh.

Until April 18 film and art professionals can register to visit the festival here.

We look forward to your visit!

This year, 31 short films will be screened in the International Selection. The programme will present works by renowned and young artists from all over the world – many of them for the first time in Germany. In the Feature Film section, nine contemporary and historical feature films enter into a dialogue. In many of these works, we encounter gestures of protest and resistance against persistent injustice and social inequality. Some artists play with cinematic genres, especially with elements of horror and suspense, which might be a response to their unease with the present. Another central motif is the revisiting of personal and political histories in direct dialogue, but also in encounters with places and landscapes. More or less tamed nature – the garden, the park, the jungle – recurs as a historical backdrop, a personal anchor point, or a utopian blueprint for a different way of living together.

In the following, we would like to give you a few first impressions of the programme.

International Selection

Variations on How to Farm a City (2024) by Mónica Martins Nunes (in artistic collaboration with Deniz Şimşek) follows the work of gardeners who, on wastelands and hills, between traffic arteries and perpetual construction sites, counter the city’s encroachment with a different form of time and coexistence: planting, harvesting, eating, and talking as daily renewed gestures that confirm their intention to stay. The urban environment in which Zachary Epcar’s Sinking Feeling (2024) unfolds are the abstract lines and reflective distortions of US office architecture, populated by the bodies and voices of three people. Their memories of an incident in a tunnel triggers daydreams and fantasies of losing control, of exhaustion, and connection.

A constant buzzing in her right ear prompts Jung Hyejin to cinematically explore the fine line that separates sound from noise. In Noise: Unwanted Sound (2024), she combines medical examination and social reflection, soundscapes, and personal-poetic self-exploration to illustrate how the voices of marginalised people are stigmatised and silenced as noise. Sylvia Schedelbauer’s Mother’s Letter (2025) is the filmmaker’s attempt to approximate her mother’s perspective. In the form of a letter, the mother addresses her daughter, who replies and comments with images from the family archive. The back-and-forth of the classic letter format becomes an intimate side-by-side that hints at conflict and closeness, while leaving room for questions that remain unanswered.

All 31 films are equal winners of the EMAF Award. The prize money, which was previously awarded to individual works, will now be shared by all selected films. A jury of the Association of German Film Critics (VDFK) will continue to award the VDFK Media Art Award at the EMAF.

The complete list of films in the International Selection can be found here.

Feature films

In Candela Sotos’ Yrupẽ (2025), the search for a lost science film by Guillermo Fernández-Zúñiga is intertwined with delving into family history and national archives. As we follow the slow growth of an yrupẽ plant in an aquarium, images and voices emerge, revealing a history of silence, concealment, and censorship. In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and looted the archive of the Palestine Research Centre. In addition to countless historical documents on Palestine, it had contained a collection of still and moving images which the Israeli Ministry of Defence appropriated. In A Fidai Film (2024), Kamal Aljafari reclaims these images and weaves them into a counter-narrative that reconstructs a Palestinian history that has been suppressed for decades.

The Soldier’s Lagoon (2024) by Pablo Álvarez Mesa follows the trail of Simon Bolívar’s fight for the liberation of Colombia in 1819. The journey takes us high into the misty region of the Páramo, a landscape in which centuries of violence and trauma are embedded. Careful observation and conversations with botanists, historians, and artisans create a multi-layered reflection on oral history and its relation to the land. The Lie, created in 1987, is a powerful testimony to the systematic extermination of German Sinti by the Nazis. Katrin Seybold and Melanie Spitta, herself the daughter of a survivor, use previously unpublished police files, photographs and documents from racial researchers, and the memories of the few survivors of the camps to reconstruct not only the genocide itself but also the attitude of a society that ignores the right for compensation.

The complete list of selected feature-length films can be found here.

EMAF Extended

After the festival, Dimitris Athiridis’ documentary exergue - on documenta 14 (2024) will be screened alongside the EMAF exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The film accompanies the artistic director of documenta 14, Adam Szymczyk, and his curatorial team as they plan and realise one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art, which for the first time took place in Kassel and Athens in 2017. This decision, which was part of the curatorial concept of documenta 14, sparked controversy in advance and ended with a budget deficit and a media scandal. In 14 chapters, exergue offers a unique behind-the-scenes look at contemporary art production, exploring the tensions between curatorial work and institutional structures, local funding and the global art market, and the role of contemporary art in a changing political landscape.

SPECTRAL

As part of SPECTRAL, the LaborBerlin collective will once again present the diversity of analogue film practice. A central work of this year’s presentation is the re-enactment of a multi-projection performance developed by Takahiko Iimura, a pioneer of expanded cinema in Japan, together with composer Alvin Lucier. Thanks to the collaboration between LaborBerlin and the researchers of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, the performance will be shown live and analogue for the first time since the 1960s. In addition, S.P.A.C.E. EXPANDED will present a series of performative and installative expanded cinema works created over the past three years as part of a residency programme. They all activate the projection space in a special way, transforming it into a place of shared experience.

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

Curated by Inga Seidler, the EMAF 2025 exhibition is dedicated to the festival theme Witnessing Witnessing, exploring testimony as an active and performative practice that goes beyond the mere documentation of events. The assembled international artists use digital media, video, VR, 3D scans, sculpture, forensic methods, and re-enactment to explore the moral, political, and emotional aspects of witnessing. Their installations question the authenticity and truth of media productions as well as the power relations involved. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to make connections and critically engage with the information presented. Works by Agil Abdullayev, Alisa Berger, Karolina Bregula, Doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran), Hannah Hallermann, Flo Kasearu, Gabriela Löffel, and Benedikt Terwiel will be on display. We would like to introduce you to four of them by way of example:

The video installation llustrating the Request for Privacy by artist Flo Kasearu is a documented performance developed together with a group of women who receive support from the Pärnu Women’s Shelter. One in five women in Estonia has experienced physical violence in her life, and one in ten has also experienced sexual violence. These are the official figures; the real figures are probably much higher. Kasearu organised a performance with the women from the Pärnu Women’s Shelter at the NO99 Theatre in Tallinn. For two hours, the women, sitting with the audience in a courtroom-like setting, read passages from the files of their own court cases. Filmed in black and white, Illustrating the Request for Privacy focuses exclusively on how the women read this artificial bureaucratic language, which seems completely detached from the traumatic events. On the one hand, the work reveals these women’s courageous emancipatory act, but at the same time, it highlights the gap between the official abstract records and the personal traumatic experiences that victims are usually left alone with.

The Serbian artist duo doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran) combine newly recorded and archived material in a two-channel video installation. Record of the Termite Landscape (Snimak pejzaža termita) is a video essay that juxtaposes archival footage of socialist miners with scenes of modern mining in capitalist societies. In doing so, doplgenger refer to the poems by the Yugoslav revolutionary and surrealist writer Oskar Davičos, to whom the title of the work refers, as well as to painter and film critic Manny Farber’s term “termite art,” which he himself defines as an artistic practice that “consistently crosses the boundaries of its own art.” The artists question their own approach, seek to explore the horizon beyond the media spectacle, and re-evaluate testimonies of the past. In this sense, doplgenger brings together different synchronic and diachronic situations and images to initiate a debate on the complex puzzle of political economy and its various representations.

The work Grammar of Calculated Ambiguity is based on an audio track recorded by Swiss artist Gabriela Löffel two weeks after the publication of the Pandora Papers during an offshore finance conference. This multi-day conference was aimed exclusively at insiders in the financial industry, trustees, lawyers, and asset managers, so to speak the architects of offshore structures. Gabriela Löffel’s recording documents a panel discussion on the public perception of the offshore financial industry. While the financial industry plays a key role in the context of global crises such as climate change and growing inequality, its structures and practices remain hidden. Parts of the recording are difficult to understand due to the acoustic conditions. Experts have therefore reconstructed them in a recording studio with the help of forensic sound engineers. Löffel filmed this process of translation, thus addressing the ambiguity of language: As we hear how technical jargon is used, among other things, to circumvent existing laws, it becomes clear that words are never neutral – even the smallest nuances can open up new realms of meaning. A composition by sound artist Olga Kokcharova complements and intervenes in the video, emphasising the installation’s malleable, porous nature.

Agil Abdullayev’s Radicals in Between Trees and Dicks is based on four years of research into queer cruising culture in Azerbaijan and the neighbouring regions of the Caucasus, Georgia and Kazakhstan – environments where queer identities are criminalised or repressed, but where cruising (the search for anonymous encounters in public) remains a vital practice. The installation combines performances, oral history testimonies and poetic re-enactments to illustrate how queer history and community are interwoven with political urgency in contested spaces. Three video channels present different perspectives on cruising: physical sites such as parks and abandoned buildings, anonymised interviews, and abstract imagery through slow motion and body movement. Agil Abdullayev’s questions dominant narratives and invites us to see public space through a queer lens. Abdullayev also incorporates elements of Azerbaijani film history, particularly Soviet films that invoke traditional family values and masculinity, into minimalist dance scenes. The work is not only about documenting queer experiences, but also about creating spaces in which these stories can be told and re-interpreted.

The exhibition is on show at Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 25 May. We will be happy to provide you with images of the individual works and further information. If you are interested, please contact presse@emaf.de.

With its Artists in Focus section, EMAF honours artists whose work is situated at the intersection of art and cinema, expanding common notions of cinematic narrative and working practices. We are delighted to welcome New Red Order (NRO) as this year’s Artists in Focus – or rather ‘NRO and Company’, as alongside films by NRO’s core contributors, Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit), the programme will also feature works created with Bayley Sweitzer, Maria Meinild, Anton Vidokle and other collaborative constellations.

NRO is a public secret society that works with networks of contributors, accomplices and informants. Through film, installation, performance, as well as collective projects (Give It Back) and partner organisations (Creative Time), NRO confronts settler-colonialist society, articulating its foundation within desires for indigeneity alongside the violent displacement of Indigenous land and life. NRO asks how those desires can be channeled toward productive and sustainable ends: “Our aim is to transcend the guilt and shame, not to remove and thus get over it, but to imagine something through and beyond, that can address and promote Indigenous futures.” (NRO)

NRO’s works incorporate a multiplicity of forms and strategies that range from genre cinema, to experimental film, advertisement and manifestos, further combining them with humour, sincerity and conscientious research. They seek to expand our political imagination and point the way to a more livable future.

“Collectively, our work seeks to devise dexterous and unlikely conceptual frameworks to unpack, rearrange, and even parody the contradictions, missteps, and trauma which characterize the history of the colonial project since 1492. We question the safe stagnation of normative attitudes towards these difficult topics; and instead attempt to scaffold toward more conceptually generative understandings of how ‘identity’ and ‘history’ are conveyed and configured within our contemporary understandings of decolonization, reconciliation, and settler-colonialism.” (Adam Khalil)

A central work in the programme is Adam Khalil and Zack Khalil’s first collaborative feature film INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place/it flies. falls./] (2016). It draws on the Anishinaabe “Prophecy of the Seven Fires”, which predicts first contact with Europeans long before it happened. In INAATE/SE/, Adam and Zack propose a filmic language that reflects Anishinaabe epistemologies in order to trace the intergenerational impact of this story in their own Indigenous community.

In Never Settle: The Program (2018), images of settler-led planetary destruction alternate with group therapy sessions in which willing settlers can investigate and overcome their own desire to “indigenise”. In the form of a recruitment video, NRO critically questions the dynamics of complicity, the urge to make amends, and the co-optation of Indigenous concerns by non-Indigenous people.

Nosferasta: First Bite (2021) by Adam Khalil, Bayley Sweitzer and Oba, a Trinidadian artist and musician based in Brooklyn, translates 500 years of colonial destruction into the language of a vampire film. It follows Oba, a shipwrecked African slave turned vampire by Christopher Columbus, and the latter, as they make their way through the “new world” gradually spreading the colonial infection – until Oba’s allegiance changes. In an unconventional blend of styles and genres, Nosferasta explores the difficulty of overcoming centuries of vampiric conditioning, posing the question of how to decolonise what is in one’s own blood.

The films of NRO and its often long-standing collaborators will be complemented by two short film programmes curated by Adam Khalil: Anti-Ethnography will feature works spanning several decades which interrogate the ethnographic gaze from an Indigenous perspective. A second programme will accompany the European book launch of Temporal Territories. An Anthology of Indigenous Experimental Cinema, edited by the COUSIN Collective (Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich and Adam Piron) in which Adam will introduce the work of some of the artists featured in the publication, among others Walter Scott’s new short film Organza’s Revenge.

In its programme, EMAF not only provides an annual overview of contemporary media art but also addresses developments and discourses that shape our social co-existence, be they of an artistic, technological or political nature. This process of critical engagement is particularly evident in the festival theme, which is developed by a curatorial team that changes every year. With the upcoming thematic focus Witnessing Witnessing, we intend to explore the role of witnesses today, how testimonies – like statements, documents, individual objects or entire archives – shape our view of the world and how they can influence political reality.

What we witness or hand down as a testimony enables others to form a picture of the world that goes beyond the limits of their own experience. Witnessing thus creates connections between individual and collective, past and present realms of experience. Testimonies are also important because they have the potential to bring into play voices that were previously unheard. They can challenge the transmission of inherited knowledge, but also unconscious processes of social repression, and thus permanently change what can be said, perceived and imagined. But what happens when these processes are interrupted? When testimonies are ignored, actively denied or used against the witnesses themselves? And how is it possible to mediate between different or contradictory accounts of reality?

The exhibition, curated by Inga Seidler, conceives of witnessing as an active and performative practice that goes far beyond the mere documentation of events. Artists use digital media, video, film and interactive installations to explore witnessing as a moral, political and emotional act. They question the authenticity and truth of media production by examining the responsibilities and power relations involved in representing events, history, trauma and violence. Visitors are invited to investigate for themselves, make connections and critically engage with the information presented, thus becoming part of the processual act of witnessing.

What can art and cinema do, or say, in times of a live-streamed genocide committed with impunity? The film programme, curated by Laura Huertas Millán, examines a range of artistic practices that explore memory, the physicality of resistance, and performance as a somatic archive for the transmission of History. The title of the series, We Sing to Wing Again, inspired by a verse by the poet Hoa Nguyen, reflects an attunement to the never-ending cycles of colonial violence, the breaking of oppressive silence, bearing witness, and sheltering hope.

When witnesses of violence and injustice are hushed up in their testimony, where is what happened registered, where is it accounted for? I could swear my face was touching stone, the title of this year’s Talks curated by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marc Siegel, Philip Widmann and Florian Wüst, is borrowed from the poem Land to Light On (1997) by Canadian author Dionne Brand. In her poetry, Brand has repeatedly turned to the question of bearing witness, to the gap between what has been done and its recounting. The four hybrid events that combine panels, lectures, readings and films attend to the transhistorical dimension of affective witnessing as well as to corporeal and sensory forms of knowledge.

About the curators:

Laura Huertas Millán is Colombian and French filmmaker and artist based in Belgium. Her films intertwine fiction, ecology, critical ethnography, and diasporic narratives to unearth histories of resistance and survival.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian works with various media, attending to epistemic disobedience and diasporic infrastructures. Furthermore, she teaches sculpture and installation at HfK Bremen.

Inga Seidler is an independent curator and project manager based in Berlin. She was exhibition curator for the transmediale festival and head of the web residency programme at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since 2021, she has been curating the exhibitions at EMAF.

Marc Siegel is a film scholar, curator and member of the Berlin-based art collective CHEAP. He is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.

Philip Widmann is a researcher, programmer, and filmmaker. He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the SNSF-funded project Paranational Cinema – Legacies and Practices at the University of Zurich.

Florian Wüst is a Berlin-based film curator, artist and lecturer. He curates film programmes for international art institutions, cinemas and festivals, and is co-founder of the Berlin Journals—On the History and Present State of the City.

The 38th European Media Art Festival will take place from April 23rd to 27th, 2025. The exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until May 25, 2025.

We are available to answer your questions and do interviews. Please feel free to contact presse@emaf.de.

Media artists from all over the world can start entering their works for the European Media Art Festival 2025. The online platform https://emaf.filmchief.com/entry-forms is now open.

We are looking forward to receiving works from the areas of Film, Installation and Expanded (live projects such as performances, interactive works, or workshops). The deadline for entries is 10 January 2025. Our curatorial team will develop the festival programme based on these entered works.

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

Reorientation of Prizes

From the next edition of the Festival, we will be reorganising the awarding of prizes. Up to now, the three festival prizes have been awarded from among all the films selected for the International Competition. In future, we will divide the available prize money equally among all the short and medium-length films selected for what will be known as the International Selection. These films will be equal winners of the EMAF Award and will receive €400 each.

We believe that films do not need a competition to prove their uniqueness. Our selection and programming is based on the dialogue that develops between films and between films and audiences. We also see the decision to dispense with competitions as a further step towards more fairness and transparency in the work of festivals. In line with the consistent payment of artists’ fees and the rejection of premiere restrictions, it is intended to strengthen the EMAF as a place where exchange and encounter take precedence over competition and exclusivity.

A jury of the VdFk will award the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics’ Association to one of the films from the International Selection. The prize is non-monetary.

German short films selected for the International Selection can be considered for the awarding of 5 reference points in accordance with current FFA regulations. For the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics´ Association, a distinction will still be made between nominated and winning films when it comes to the awarding of reference points.

The 38th European Media Art Festival will take place from 23 to 27 April 2025. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until 25 May 2025.

We are available to answer your questions and do interviews. Please feel free to contact presse@emaf.de.

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.