The viewing process for EMAF 2024 is already in full swing and we are very happy to have an international curatorial team on board again.

This year’s film selection is yet again in trusted hands: Ryan Ferko (artist and filmmaker; Toronto), Mason Leaver-Yap (writer and producer; Glasgow), Philip Widmann (filmmaker and curator; Berlin) and Tinne Zenner (artist and filmmaker; Copenhagen), together with Katrin Mundt (co-festival director EMAF), have already been responsible for the short and feature-length film programmes of last year’s festival. They have also significantly shaped EMAF in recent years through their own artistic and curatorial contributions. We very much look forward to working together, viewing, planning, and debating!

We will introduce you to the curators of the other festival sectors in the upcoming weeks.

Until then, we welcome your submissions – by 7th January, 2024!

The European Media Art Festival is celebrating International Short Film Day on December 20 with a specially curated programme!

Selected films from four decades will be presented, taking a look back in order to look forward. They deal with the attempt of visualizing a time of political upheaval that one did not experience oneself. It is about the sensuality of one’s own memory and the stories that are told against all odds and that must be kept secret despite everything.

In Search of a Practical and Realistic Attitude, Alexander Kluge, BRD 1983, 12‘

Hacked Circuit, Deborah Stratman, US 15’

The Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs, Walid Raad, US 1996-1999, 17’

Afraid Doesn´t Exist, Anna Zett, DE 2023, 31‘

We would like to invite you to join us - on December 20 at 7:30 pm at the Lagerhalle Osnabrück!

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 to 28 April 2024. For five days, Osnabrück will become an international and trend-setting platform for media art and a meeting place for artists, curators, researchers and students. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will also be on view until 26 May 2024.

The EMAF congratulates its long-time cooperation partner, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, on its 30th anniversary and participates in the jubilee program with a special, internationally acclaimed film:

“È noite na América / Es ist Nacht in Amerika”, Ana Vaz (Brazil, France, Italy 2022, 66 min, OV with English subtitles)

Ana Vaz’ feature-length debut is a film in shades of blue, where documentary storytelling meets moments of horror and fantasy. It was filmed in the surroundings of Brasília and in the local zoo, habitat to hundreds of rescued animal species.

“Anteaters, wolves, owls, forest foxes and capybaras meet biologists, veterinarians, animal keepers, and environmental police. A complex web of intersecting perspectives emerges from the challenge of preserving life. In the end, who are the real prisoners?” (Ana Vaz)

For Ana Vaz (*1986 in Brasília), film serves as an instrument to critically question her own perception of land, language, and borders. She understands her works as film-poems that develop along territories and events in which inner and outer colonialisms re-live in human and more-than-human relations.

Her films have been presented at exhibitions and festivals worldwide, including the Tate Modern (London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin), New York Film Festival, Berlinale, Flaherty Seminar and British Film Institute, London - a well as regularly at the EMAF.

We invite you to join us on 15 July at 7 p.m. at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück! The admission is free.

On International Museum Day on 21 May 2023, there will be a guided tour through the exhibition of the European Media Art Festival with curator Inga Seidler at 4 p.m. in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. The festival theme “Trembling Time” also forms the content and conceptual framework for the current exhibition. In the festival exhibition curated by Inga Seidler, our understanding of time is to be questioned. The artists shown consider alternative histories and visions of the future beyond the idea of ​​progress. Her observations, narratives or deconstructions take place in the context of time and her perception against the background of a global climate and environmental crisis.

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!

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. The 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). A panel with the participating artists and curators (moderated by Mark Paul Meyer) will address how these ephemeral works of art can be preserved and made available now and in the future.

The project SPECTRAL is supported by European Union and Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa

Image: José Val del Omar’s schemes on pulsating lighting included in his text “Five types of tactile lighting”, handwritten document, undated.

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.

Accreditation for Film/Art Professionals as well as students is still possible until 12 April on our website: https://registration.emaf.de/en/

In less than three weeks the 36th 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.

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.

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.

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.

Video and audio material from the archive of the GDR opposition forms the basis for Anna Zett’s film Afraid Doesn’t Exist (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. 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 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 Slaughterhouses of Modernity (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. They also form the background for an interrogation of the Berlin Palace and its position between experiment and restoration.

Further films in the programme are by Udval Altangerel, Parastoo Anoushahpour, Ben Balcom, Karolina Bregula, coyote, Ana Edwards, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat, Luke Fowler, Wenqian Gao, Dazhi Huang & Huizhen Zhong, Eginhartz Kanter, Fox Maxy, Hardeep Pandhal & Adam Sinclair, Morgan Quaintance, James Richards, Bassem Saad, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Eri Saito, Deborah Stratman, Gautam Valluri and Gernot Wieland.

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.

Registration for Film/Art Professional accreditation is now possible on our website at https://registration.emaf.de/en/

The accreditation allows free access to all film programmes, the exhibition, talks programmes and EMAF Campus. The deadline for accreditation is 12 April. Further information can be found at: https://www.emaf.de/en/service/

There is no accreditation fee for press representatives. Please contact presse@emaf.de

You will find out more about the program in the coming months.

Exhibition, Film Programme and Talks - last week we informed you about the different sections that make up EMAF’s thematic focus “Trembling Time”. Today we would like to introduce you to the curators who develop these programmes for you:

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.

Picture Copyrights: EMAF

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 2023: „Trembling Time“

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.

You can read more about our curators in the press area on our homepage.

The previews for the 36th EMAF 2023 have started! That is why we would like to introduce you today to the people who will be selecting the films of the International Competition and the Features section in the coming months and who will be presenting and discussing them at the festival. In addition to Katrin Mundt, head of the EMAF film section, this international team includes Ryan Ferko (Toronto/Berlin), Mason Leaver-Yap (Glasgow/Berlin), Philip Widmann (Berlin) and Tinne Zenner (Copenhagen). We are looking forward to the collaboration!

Ryan Ferko is an artist working predominantly in film and video. Between cinemas and galleries, his work is concerned with how history and power is constructed in landscapes. Based in Toronto, this work is invested in collective ways of addressing and experiencing place, and since 2013 he has worked frequently in collaboration with Parastoo Anoushahpour & Faraz Anoushahpour. Recent solo and collaborative work has been shown at Flaherty Seminar, Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Sharjah Film Platform, Toronto International Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, European Media Art Festival (EMAF), and Media City Film Festival, amongst others.

Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce texts, exhibitions, and events. He has recently been working with Renée Green and Free Agent Media, Oreet Ashery, Stefanie Heinze, Onyeka Igwe, Winnie Herbstein, Ima-Abasi Okon, Beatrice Gibson, Laura Guy, Sunil Gupta and the Estate of Tessa Boffin, Andrea Büttner, Iman Issa, and Jimmy Robert. He is based in Glasgow and Berlin.

Philip Widmann makes films, texts, and film programmes. His film and video work has been shown in film festivals and art spaces, among them the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Views from the Avantgarde / NYFF, Yamagata, FID Marseille, CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, Videonale, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Institute for Endotic Research Berlin. He has selected film programmes for Arkipel Jakarta, Image Forum Tokyo, Kassel Dokfest, and others.

Tinne Zenner is a visual artist, filmmaker and programmer based in Copenhagen. Her films have been shown at a number of international film festivals including NYFF, CPH:DOX, Courtisane, Oberhausen, EMAF, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Image Forum Tokyo and EXiS, and her installation work exhibited at museums and galleries internationally. Zenner is a co-founder and member of Sharna Pax (formed in 2013), a film collective based in London/Copenhagen working between the fields of anthropology, documentary and visual arts.

+++ reminder: Call for Entries +++

And as a reminder: Films, installations, performance projects and works from the field of expanded media can still be submitted for the festival until 8 January 2023 via the online portal https://registration.emaf.de/. We are eagerly awaiting your submissions!

We invite media artists from all over the world to 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 fields of film, installation, performance and expanded media can be submitted. All information and regulations can be found at our website. The deadline for submissions is 8 January 2023.

The submission of works is free of charge. Artist 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. For five days, Osnabrück will become an international and trend-setting platform for media art and a meeting place for artists, curators, researchers and students. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue until 29 May 2023.

In the framework of this year’s edition of the festival from 20 to 24 April, the European Media Art Festival (EMAF) is presenting five discussion events, with theorists, artists and designers, in which the meaning, use, and costs of things is examined in relation to the complex relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. In the EMAF Talks, curated by Daphne Dragona, acknowledged speakers have an opportunity to discuss the connection between living and non-living worlds along with the audience. The EMAF Talks will take place in English. Three of the talks can be experienced virtually as an online event on the EMAF website, while the other two talks can be attended on site at locations in Osnabrück. The complete timetable for the festival with the EMAF Talks is now available online at emaf.de/en/timetable.

‘The EMAF Talks examine what it means to live with things, but also how various temporalities, ontologies, and views of the world assert their influence,’ as the EMAF curator has summarized. What is also central is the question of the role that art, design, or technology can play in the new creation of substantial relationships to the environment and to our planet. ‘Some of the topics addressed are: the challenges and possibilities of working and living with intelligent infrastructures, the acknowledgement of the agency of the living environment, and the circulation of matter’ says Daphne Dragona.

The EMAF Talk Personhood of a forest, moderated by the Berlin-based architect and curator Rosario Talevi, thus discusses how it is possible to understand ecosystems, forests, and rivers not as reified objects, but instead as persons with their own rights and possibilities. In it, the artists Ursula Biemann (Switzerland) and Caetano (Brazil), whose works are often related to forests, have a chance to speak, just like the international artist and activist collective ‘The Forest Curriculum’. In the EMAF Talk Smart things at work, the founder of the feminist organization ‘Superrr Lab’, Julia Kloiber, a specialist in public interest technology, talks with the researchers Alessandro Delfanti (University of Toronto) and Jenny Kennedy (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). It deals with the interrelations between people and machines, including in the field of artificial intelligence. The EMAF Talk titled Design for multiple worlds, with moderation by Valentina Karga, a professor at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg, is dedicated to the influence of object design on our thinking and existence, but also its possibilities to create new worlds. Also on the online podium are the designer and activist Nina Paim (Basel/Porto/Rio de Janeiro) and the researcher Dr Ahmed Ansari (New York).

The EMAF Talk Tranxxeno Becomings in Decolonial Speculative Futures: Amateur Lichenology on Friday, 22 April, at 4 p.m. at the Haus der Jugend deals with the symbiotic communities that lichens represent. The artist Adriana Knouf (the Netherlands /USA) discusses et al. what the symbiosis of mushrooms and algae, for instance, can teach us in an era of climate change.

In a live discussion on Saturday, 23 April, at 4 p.m. at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the media artist Valentina Karga presents her installation of a table that consumes itself—The life of a self-eating table. Along with the audience, she will address questions regarding needs, consumption, and digestion in connection with meeting the challenge of our time: What do we really need for a frugal life and what not?

The complete programme of the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF), including the talks, is now available online at emaf.de.

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.

We warmly invite you to report on the festival and to be part of the 35th European Media Art Festival.

In this year’s programme, which deals with our entanglement in the world of things under the motto, The thing is, the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) is presenting a total of 115 films from thirty countries. After a forced two-year break, this year’s edition of the festival is once again taking place as an on-site event in cinemas and numerous exhibition venues in Osnabrück. ‘In the past two years, there has again and again been speculation regarding what role cinema will perhaps play when we are once again able to gather outside our own four walls in order to watch films together,’ says Katrin Mundt, a member of the EMAF management team and the person responsible for the film programme. ‘For festivals like EMAF, the cinema has always been important as a place for encounters and direct exchange between artists and spectators. We would thus like to celebrate our return to the festival cinemas with you with a diverse, sensual, and ambitious programme.’

The eight programmes of the international competition provide an overview of the diversity and current developments in the field of experimental and artistic short films. They take a critical look at the built and natural spaces in which we live and trace the stories embedded in them. In Untitled Fragments #6, the Serbian duo Doplgenger (Isidora Ilić & Boško Prostran) thus presents an historical moment again: the confrontation between Serbian and Croatian football fans at the Maksimir Stadium in 1990. A premonition of the collapse of Yugoslavia is hinted at in the choreographed-seeming advances and retreats of the security personnel recorded for television. Half Wet by Carlos Irijalba imagines the lush landscape of Oaxaca, Mexico, as a place in the future where life is barely still possible. Long after the disappearance of the last tourists, a man there unperturbedly performs an old ritual of his ancestors: the cleaning of swimming pools.

A series of films interleaves personal memory, narratives, and music to sketch a new, multifaceted picture of our present time. How to Improve the World by Nguyen Trinh Thi, a Vietnamese artist and participant of documenta fifteen, shows the coexistence of traditional knowledge and current changes in how indigenous communities live together, which is also reflected in speaking and listening, singing and dreaming. Some works play with film as a medium of illusion and spectacle and experiment with its material characteristics and narrative possibilities. Using the means of experimental film, melodrama, and home movies, in Home When You Return, Carl Elsaesser reconstructs the anatomy of an unoccupied house. The memory of his deceased grandmother seems to be reflected in the psychologically charged spaces. At the same time, the filmic space is also intimated as a space of shared sensory experiences.

The six feature films in the programme of the 35th EMAF each have their own content-related and formal focuses, but share an interest in the complex relationship between the body and politics. In By the Throat, Amir Borenstein & Effi Weiss examine the human voice as well as possibilities to express one’s own identity in and through language, to elude ascriptions from the outside, or to gain political attention. In Rampart by Marko Grba Singh, a recurring dream becomes the occasion for tracing a history whose political upheavals can still be felt in the present in VHS videos of his family. Last but not least, Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day by Mohammad Shawky Hassan is an exuberant, polyphonic, queer new version of 1001 Nights, which, based on the filmmaker’s love journal, blurs the boundaries between personal and collective experience, narratives, and memory.

Artists are ever more frequently choosing documentary means to address the political and social reality of the present or the pictures and narratives of the past. This is also reflected in the film selection for EMAF. In the series Implication. On Documentary Ethics, we would like to address some of the ethical questions that arise when working with documentary material. For this, four artists from the international competition were invited to choose films that shed light on the topic from various perspectives and to discuss them with the audience. It is thus about working with and appropriating found material, depicting closeness and intimacy, dealing with politically motivated censorship, and questions relating to releasing and/or distributing sensitive, lost, or intentionally expropriated material. Alejandro Alvarado & Concha Barquero, Jamie Crewe, and Alaa Mansour present and discuss films by Fernando Ruiz Vergara, Yulene Olaizola, and Jayce Salloum & Elia Suleiman with the audience.

Further highlights of the film programme include the screening series on the festival topic It’s rather a verb, which was put together by Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat, and the films of the two Artists in Focus, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Emily Wardill. Artist talks and live discussions round off the programme.

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. All the presentations and events will be published on our homepage, on 18 March. Registrations for accreditation are already now possible on the website.

In this year’s EMAF exhibition, the curator Inga Seidler has dedicated herself to the essence of ‘things’. A central component is thus, among other things, dealing with this essence and how it influences the environment.

The artist Ursula Biemann and the Brazilian architect and spatial planner Paulo Tavares examine the possibilities of nature as a legal entity. Their video installation Forest Law takes a look at this negotiation based on spatial politics and the indigenous resistance in the Amazon region.

The artist Valentina Karga pursues a different approach. With her living sculpture, she takes a look at the decomposition of things, which is important for an intact life cycle. The table that eats itself is an object with a planned obsolescence; it enriches the life cycle as it satisfies our need to acquire newly designed things.

Further information about the programme is coming soon.

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.

Programme

Due to the ongoing Corona pandemic, the European Media Art Festival is adjusting the presentation of its programme to reflect current conditions. Large portions of our films, installations and talks will also be shown online starting 21 April - at emaf.cinemalovers.de. The online programme will be available beyond the duration of the festival until 2 May.

At present, thousands of visitors at a festival, as was usual at the European Media Art Festival before the Corona pandemic, is not even remotely conceivable. The EMAF curators are therefore planning various online formats in addition to the events and exhibitions in our real space. “The EMAF traditionally has a very international audience. Through the online programme, we can make as many films and contributions as possible accessible to a broad audience - without anyone having to get on a train or a plane”, says Alfred Rotert, member of the festival management.

In addition to the films in the International Competition, this year’s highlights surely include the film series curated by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy on the festival theme, “Possessed”. The series explores how the cinematic apparatus is bound up with us human beings and takes possession of us - in films by Ruy Guerra, Amy Halpern and Eva C. Heldmann, among others. In addition, the series “Show Us the Money and We Will Resist”, compiled by Nour Ouayda, focuses on the history of video art in Lebanon. Works by Akram Zaatari, Mohamed Soueid, Chantal Partamian and others illuminate the interrelationships between television, artistic experimentation and alternative media.

At Kunsthalle Osnabrück, curator Inga Seidler will present works that address colonial and capitalist impulses on the themes of domination, control, ownership and property in a variety of ways, taking a particular look at the role of technologies - for instance in Vladan Joler’s “New Extractivism” or Nora Al Badri’s “Babylonian Vision”. Patricia Dominguez’s altar-like video installation fuses myths, symbols and rituals with visions of extraction and indigenous land rights, cultural appropriation and nature destroyed by industrialisation.

Art and culture have not exactly been at the top of the priority list in the political sphere in recent months. But they are important elements of social discourse, creating meeting spaces and promoting social cohesion. With its programmes and themes, the EMAF 2021 stands for this aspect as well.

We warmly invite you to join us at the EMAF 2021, whether online or, if possible, on site!

The deadline for submissions to the 34th European Media Art Festival closed on 31 December 2020. Our heartfelt thanks to all filmmakers, artists and distributors who submitted their works to us! At 2,600, the number was significantly higher than in previous years. “We are thrilled with the large number and diversity of forms of the works submitted to us for the 34th European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück. There is also a much broader geographical spread than in previous years”, says Katrin Mundt, head of the EMAF film programme and a member of the festival management.

This year’s EMAF theme “Possessed” focuses on questions of ownership and forms of possession. Films, installations, performances and lectures will be shown that explore how ownership determines our global present and future and how this is interwoven with our recent past. They show how objects, spaces or experiences can take possession of us, and in doing so facilitate alternative forms of being and acting together. And by experimenting with strategies of appropriation, distribution and withdrawal, the contributions propose new modes of presence and participation in the spaces and institutions of film and media art. While the exhibition, film programme and talks are each devoted to different aspects of the thematic focus, individual formats address their connections and interrelationships.

The exhibition curated by Inga Seidler takes ownership and colonialism, i.e. (racial) capitalism as its starting point. The selected works deal with inequalities that this system of ownership and property (rights) has produced: the expropriation and deprivation of land, subjectivity, histories, memories and rights. They shed light on the ways in which this continues in the digital realm and feeds back into the connection between technology and abstraction. The exhibition also presents works by artists and activists who imagine alternative forms of ownership, different models of communality without property, and changing social realities.

Curated by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy, the film programme entitled “The Unpossessable Possessor” considers the cinematographic apparatus as a living creature entangled in a complicated relationship with humans. Is its relationship with us parasitic or mutualistic? Are its intentions pure or corrupt? Are we its master or does it have reign over our selves? Is it human? Or something else? Does it love us? Clearly we have ceded a good part of our collective consciousness to the film machine. Perhaps it would be a good idea to find out who it is and what it wants.

Curated by Daphne Dragona, the talk programme explores what “possession” and “being possessed” mean in and for the contemporary world and how they are connected. Visual artists, filmmakers and theorists are invited to discuss property, control and sovereignty in the context of land ownership, identity and technology, and to explore how these are informed by old and new beliefs, rituals and habits. By focusing on historical and contemporary forms of colonialism and extractivism, the programme asks what it means to own, lose and reclaim one’s world/s, and explores forms of resistance, relationality and kinship.

Theme curators:

Inga Seidler
is a curator and cultural producer based in Berlin. Over the past years, she has developed, produced and curated large-scale exhibitions and performances as well as residency and publication projects. After several years as a producer and curator for exhibitions and performance projects at transmediale festival, she headed the digital program at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Questions of shared knowledges, cultural creation and organizing with the help of or in response to new technologies are also at the core of her current role at ACUD MACHT NEU programming the series COLLECTIVE PRACTICES.

Anja Dornieden & Juan David González Monroy
are filmmakers based in Berlin. They work together under the moniker OJOBOCA. Together they practice Orrorism, a simulated method of inner and outer transformation. They have presented their films and performances in a wide variety of venues and festivals worldwide, among them the Wexner Center for the Arts, Österreichische Filmmuseum, Anthology Film Archives, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Kunstverein München, Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam and New York Film Festival. They are both members of the artist-run film lab LaborBerlin.

Daphne Dragona
is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Through her work, she engages with artistic practices and methodologies that challenge contemporary forms of power. She has collaborated with institutions such as the Onassis Stegi, EMST (National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens), LABoral (Gijón), Aksioma (ljubljana), NeMe (Limassol), and the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart) for the curating of exhibitions, conferences and workshops. Dragona was part of the core curatorial team of the transmediale festival from 2015 until 2019. She holds a PhD from the Faculty of Communication & Media Studies of the University of Athens.

If you would like portrait pictures of the curators, please get in touch. We are also available for further questions and interviews. In addition, we invite you to join up with us in the coming months. The Covid-19 pandemic will surely keep us busy and demand new forms for meeting.

Media artists from around the world can now submit their works for screening at the European Media Art Festival 2021. The online platform https://submissions.emaf.de is now open. Works from the fields of film, installation, performance and Expanded Media can be submitted. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2020.

The 34th European Media Art Festival will take place from 21 to 25 April 2021. For five days, Osnabrück will become an international, trend-setting platform for media art and a meeting place for artists, curators, gallery owners and students. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will also be on view until 30 May 2021. For more information about the festival, please visit our homepage: www.emaf.de.

For your editorial use, we would be pleased to send you a logo and press photos of EMAF. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information and interviews. Please send inquiries to presse@emaf.de.