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.

On the shortest day of the year, short film in all its diversity, creativity and joy of experimentation will be celebrated throughout Germany on the Short Film Day.

In cooperation with the Filmtheater Hasetor, the EMAF is showing a programme with five films from a twenty-year span. It deals with the deceptive feeling of being at home and in touch with oneself, with the thin walls separating the private from the public, and with fragile idylls thriving on the ruins of prosperity. Also on show is the winner of the German Short Film Award 2022 in the documentary category: “Lamarck” by Marian Mayland (DE 2021, 28’). Congratulations again to Marian as well as to Gernot Wieland, who was awarded in the category Experimental Film for his work “Bird in Italian is Uccello”.

You can also expect in the programme “Schönen, guten Tag” by Corinna Schnitt (DE 1995, 5’), “Hus” by Inger Lise Hansen (NO 1997, 7’), “El Laberinto” by Laura Huertas Millán (CO 2018, 21’), “Atomic Garden” by Ana Vaz (JP 2018, 8’). Beginning at 10.30 pm on 21 December at the Filmtheater Hasetor.

If you are interested in showing your work at one of Europe’s most renowned media art festivals, you can still submit it for screening via our submission platform until 8 January 2023. All information, the regulations and the link to the submission platform can be found directly on our homepage at www.emaf.de.

We look forward to welcoming some of you next week at the Short Film Day at the Hasetor cinema and wish you all a joyful holiday season and a happy and healthy New Year!

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.

With the end of this year’s festival, preparations for next year start already. The EMAF 2023 will take place again in Osnabrück from 19 - 23 April.

To help you pass the time as well as possible, there is still a lot to listen to on our website. In addition to the complete Talks, you will find film talks on all the competition programmes, a number of feature films, thematic programmes as well as interviews with our Artists in Focus Emily Wardill and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. We hope you enjoy listening and look forward to seeing you again next year.

You can find all the online material at: Online

Some 13.000 visitors attended our film programmes, performances, and live talks, as well as the media art exhibition The thing is. With the exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück closing on 29 May, the 35th European Media Art Festival draws to a successful conclusion. ‘This year saw a wonderful return to the classic on-site festival that we have been missing for two years, and we are highly relieved that everything worked out so well,’ says the managing director Alfred Rotert. ‘The number of accreditations was clearly above the level of the time before Corona, but there was still a certain reluctance on the part of the audience to rush into the festival as in the past. So we count the 35th EMAF as a great success and extend our sincere thanks to all of our sponsors.’

Feedback from international festival guests, participating students, and visitors has been uniformly positive, says Katrin Mundt, the festival direction’s Head of Film Programmes. ‘The 35th EMAF was marked by a very special atmosphere of lively interaction about media art—which is something we had hoped for, and also a sign of the festival’s quality.’ Mundt notes that many visitors took advantage of the beautiful weather, and of Osnabrück’s cosmopolitanism, to get together after the screenings and events and discuss what they had seen and experienced. ‘All this encourages us to start planning the next festival as an on-site event with even more energy.’

SAVE THE DATE!

The 36th EMAF will take place from 19–23 April 2023.

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.

We cordially invite you to report on the European Media Art Festival and to join us again next year.

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) invites you to the Kunsthalle Osnabrück on 15 May at 4 pm for International Museum Day. The artist Valentina Karga will present her live performance The Life of a Self-Eating Table (in English).

The life of a self-eating table invites us to an embodied session: We will be feeding ourselves simultaneously with the self-eating table, communing our bodies and its body through feelings and reflections on digestion processes, and we will ask: Which needs are substantial for life and which are not? What is there to learn from and with this friendly self-cannibal?

Valentina Karga’s work operates between art, design, research, and architecture. It draws together elements of socially engaged practices and speculative experiments that question the existing social and physical infrastructures within the realms of energy, economy, and sustainability.

Valetina Karga is also represented in this year’s EMAF exhibition with her installation The Table That Eats Itself. The exhibition The thing is occupies itself with the essence of ‘things’, the relationship between objects and people and their bodies, and questions of objectification.

In addition to the EMAF exhibition, the KOMPOST exhibition Try to describe a place can also be seen at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 29 May. Participation in the performance and admission to the Kunsthalle Osnabrück are free of charge. Drinks and snacks will be available during the performance.

We cordially invite you to join us on Sunday!

After 5 eventful and exciting days, the 35th European Media Art Festival ended on Sunday. We look back with satisfaction on a successful festival. We would like to thank all the artists, curators, visitors and sponsors who made this possible and look forward to welcome you again next year.

The prizewinners of the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) have also been announced: the EMAF Award for groundbreaking work in media art goes to the British artist Jamie Crewe (Glasgow) for her experimental film False Wife, which, in the style of a poppers training video, probes and discusses the boundaries between individuals, gender, and the mind. The prize is endowed with 3.000€. The Dialogue Award for the promotion of intercultural exchange goes to the Spanish-born artist Carlos Irijalba (Amsterdam) for his film Half Wet, which reflects on present-day consumer behaviour from the perspective of a future state of climate emergency. The prize is endowed with 2.000€. Home When You Return by the US experimental filmmakers Carl Elsaesser (New York) is honoured by the Media Art Award of the German Film Critics Association (VdFk). This contribution explores female role models, grieving, and loss through the projection of a historical melodrama on the walls of a filmmaker’s grandmother’s house. The prize is endowed with 2.000€. Moreover, the VdFk Jury has awarded an Honourable Mention to the Italian artist Chiara Caterina for L’incanto. The film undertakes a journey into the collective subconscious by linking the fates of five women.

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Award were decided by a jury of media artists and curators, this year composed of Dušica Dražić (Serbia), Onyeka Igwe (Great Britain), and Erik Martinson (Canada). The film critics Esther Buss, Peter Kremski, and Jenni Zylka formed the jury for the EMAF Media Art Award of the VdFk.

The EMAF Award (endowed with 3,000 Euro) bestowed on Jamie Crewe’s False Wife goes to a ‘work that inventively combines layers of manipulated images, sounds, and text, bringing them to bear on the audience with immediacy at breakneck speed’, as the jury noted in their statement. ‘False Wife oscillates our boundaries between the individual and the collective, the body and the mind, the fixity of gender and the social contract of cinema.’ The Dialogue Award (endowed with 2,000 Euro) for Half Wet by Carlos Irijalba premieres the ‘subtle way in which the work points to a disjuncture between the short-sightedness of individualized environmentalism and the postcolonial realities of those already living in a class-based state of climate emergency’, as the jury explains its decision. The film, they note, immerses viewers in a world of everyday futility and the related humour.

With Home When You Return by Carl Elsaesser, the jury of the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics Association (endowed with 2,000 Euro) has singled out a ‘touching, intersubjective narrative about loss, grief, female role models, and the shadowy world of the domestic sphere’, as noted in the jury statement. ‘Toying with double exposures, blurring, intertitles and rolling titles, the soundtrack from the historical film, and also sounds from the here and now, Carl Elsaesser permits past and present, filmic reality and personal history, to interfuse in a masterly way—and on 16mm film.’ The film L’incanto von Chiara Caterina, with an honourable mention, connects ‘images and sounds that, though originally without any relation to each other, already possess a suggestive power of expression as individual elements—giving rise to a surreal synthesis of the arts’, as announced by the VdFk Jury.

The jury statements are available in full length at: Sections The exhibition of the 35th EMAF will remain on show at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 29 May.

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.

With kind regards from the EMAF 2022 team

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) starts tomorrow, Wednesday, April 20th, with a ceremonial opening at Kunsthalle Osnabrück and a series of media art exhibitions at other Osnabrück locations. The 35th edition of the festival will be presented by State Secretary Dr. Jörg Mielke and the festival management. The official media art exhibition of the festival, which will be on view until May 29, opens at 7:30 pm at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Hasemauer 1, with the main theme The thing is about the complex relationship between humans and things. Admission is free. With the exception of a mask requirement at Kunsthalle, there are no further corona restrictions.

Also at 7:30 pm three further exhibitions of the festival section EMAF Campus open in the Neubau of the Kunsthalle, in the art space hase29 (Hasestraße 29/30) and at Haus der Jugend (Große Gildewart 6-9). During the festival period up to and including Sunday, April 24, further exhibitions, media art performances and numerous international film programs can be experienced at various Osnabrück venues. With more than 120 films from 30 countries, the EMAF presents its usual exciting, extensive and international film programme over four days.

Details on all offers can be found in the festival timetable at: www.emaf.de/en/timetable/

The 35th European Media Art Festival will conclude on Sunday, April 24, with the award ceremony at 5:30 pm in the Lagerhalle Osnabrück, Rolandsmauer 26, at which three groundbreaking media art works will be awarded jury prizes. All festival friends are cordially invited to visit the EMAF opening and the other events of the festival!

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) expresses its gratitude to its sponsors, in particular 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.

Best regards from the EMAF 2022 team

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 of the festival 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.

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.

Some 13.000 visitors attended our film programmes, performances, and live talks, as well as the media art exhibition The thing is. With the exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück closing on 29 May, the 35th European Media Art Festival draws to a successful conclusion. ‘This year saw a wonderful return to the classic on-site festival that we have been missing for two years, and we are highly relieved that everything worked out so well,’ says the managing director Alfred Rotert. ‘The number of accreditations was clearly above the level of the time before Corona, but there was still a certain reluctance on the part of the audience to rush into the festival as in the past. So we count the 35th EMAF as a great success and extend our sincere thanks to all of our sponsors.’

Feedback from international festival guests, participating students, and visitors has been uniformly positive, says Katrin Mundt, the festival direction’s Head of Film Programmes. ‘The 35th EMAF was marked by a very special atmosphere of lively interaction about media art—which is something we had hoped for, and also a sign of the festival’s quality.’ Mundt notes that many visitors took advantage of the beautiful weather, and of Osnabrück’s cosmopolitanism, to get together after the screenings and events and discuss what they had seen and experienced. ‘All this encourages us to start planning the next festival as an on-site event with even more energy.’

SAVE THE DATE!

The 36th EMAF will take place from 19–23 April 2023.

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.

We cordially invite you to report on the European Media Art Festival and to join us again next year.

The prizewinners of the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) have been announced: the EMAF Award for groundbreaking work in media art goes to the British artist Jamie Crewe (Glasgow) for her experimental film False Wife, which, in the style of a poppers training video, probes and discusses the boundaries between individuals, gender, and the mind. The Dialogue Award for the promotion of intercultural exchange goes to the Spanish-born artist Carlos Irijalba (Amsterdam) for his film Half Wet, which reflects on present-day consumer behaviour from the perspective of a future state of climate emergency. Home When You Return by the US experimental filmmakers Carl Elsaesser (New York) is honoured by the Media Art Award of the German Film Critics Association (VdFk). This contribution explores female role models, grieving, and loss through the projection of a historical melodrama on the walls of a filmmaker’s grandmother’s house. Moreover, the VdFk Jury has awarded an Honourable Mention to the Italian artist Chiara Caterina for L’incanto. The film undertakes a journey into the collective subconscious by linking the fates of five women.

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Award were decided by a jury of media artists and curators, this year composed of Dušica Dražić (Serbia), Onyeka Igwe (Great Britain), and Erik Martinson (Canada). The film critics Esther Buss, Peter Kremski, and Jenni Zylka formed the jury for the EMAF Media Art Award of the VdFk.

The EMAF Award (endowed with 3,000 Euro) bestowed on Jamie Crewe’s False Wife goes to a ‘work that inventively combines layers of manipulated images, sounds, and text, bringing them to bear on the audience with immediacy at breakneck speed’, as the jury noted in their statement. ‘False Wife oscillates our boundaries between the individual and the collective, the body and the mind, the fixity of gender and the social contract of cinema.’ The Dialogue Award (endowed with 2,000 Euro) for Half Wet by Carlos Irijalba premieres the ‘subtle way in which the work points to a disjuncture between the short-sightedness of individualized environmentalism and the postcolonial realities of those already living in a class-based state of climate emergency’, as the jury explains its decision. The film, they note, immerses viewers in a world of everyday futility and the related humour.

With Home When You Return by Carl Elsaesser, the jury of the EMAF Media Art Award of the German Film Critics Association (endowed with 2,000 Euro) has singled out a ‘touching, intersubjective narrative about loss, grief, female role models, and the shadowy world of the domestic sphere’, as noted in the jury statement. ‘Toying with double exposures, blurring, intertitles and rolling titles, the soundtrack from the historical film, and also sounds from the here and now, Carl Elsaesser permits past and present, filmic reality and personal history, to interfuse in a masterly way—and on 16mm film.’ The film L’incanto von Chiara Caterina, with an honourable mention, connects ‘images and sounds that, though originally without any relation to each other, already possess a suggestive power of expression as individual elements—giving rise to a surreal synthesis of the arts’, as announced by the VdFk Jury.

The jury statements are available in full length at: www.emaf.de/en/sections/ The exhibition of the 35th EMAF will remain on show at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 29 May.

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.

“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.

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.

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

The media art exhibition in this year’s European Media Art Festival (EMAF), which is taking place at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück from 20 April to 29 May, occupies itself with the essence of ‘things’, the relationship between objects and people and their bodies, and questions of objectification.

The exhibition titled The thing is presents installations, sculptures, and video works by international media artists. ‘The artworks not only examine what constitutes a thing, but also pose questions regarding the point at which we can draw the line between lifeless things and living beings based on quasi-objects and hybrids’, says the curator Inga Seidler, who is responsible for the EMAF exhibition this year. ‘At the same time, things embody, for instance, interests or needs and allow statements about how we live with others and in our surroundings—as becomes clear when the composition, production conditions, meanings, functions, and design of things are examined.’

The video installation Jerricans to can Jerry by the Berlin-based artist Leon Kahane focuses on the container known as a ‘jerrycan’, which the Brose company developed for the German Wehrmacht starting in 1936, and produced as its first mass product in a series. The work spans a large spectrum, from the production conditions under the exploitation of Soviet forced labourers to the heritage of the company’s involvement in the National Socialist regime, which the Brose family continues to deny today. In Kahane’s work, such a container is brought to life as the figure ‘Colonel Canister’, who from its perspective as a contemporary witness reports on the developments and violent events that can be retold based on this object’s history and shifts in meaning.

In their work, the Danish artist duo Stine Deja and Marie Munk examine the emotional relationship between people and nonhuman objects and hybrids like AIs, robots, or avatars. With Synthetic Seduction, they present a setting that seems like a kind of futuristic laboratory. How can the pulsing, flesh-like sculptures be categorized: as things or as living beings? And how do robots that approach each other romantically complicate our view of these machines?

The transdisciplinary artist RA Walden contemplates the fragility of the body and the relationship to the things in its surroundings from a queer, disabled perspective. Crip Ecologies consists of dozens of glass vessels and petri dishes. Found in the vessels are various natural materials such as soil, stones, seeds, or fluids in different colours. Some of the labels on the vessels bear the names of people or streets. RA Walden thus poses questions like: What value do objects have when they are more difficult to access? And in what relationship does the fragility of the human body thus stand to the fragility of our ecosystem?

Further information about this year’s EMAF exhibition, The thing is, can be found on our website.

We warmly invite you to be part of the EMAF in 2022!

A new EMAF programme strand honours two international moving image artists

EMAF is honouring the work of selected artists whose moving image works provide important impulses in contemporary media art with a new programme strand. ‘Artist in Focus’ is also intended to facilitate encounters with authors and their works that have received international attention in the visual arts, but have hitherto had less presence in the festival world. The series will open with Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Emily Wardill.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz will present an extensive selection of her moving image works, including her debut feature film Oriana (2022), for the first time in Germany. Her works bring together documentary, fictional, and performative elements so as to shed light on the natural and political landscapes of the Caribbean, the history and present of anticolonial movements, and the aesthetically and socially subversive power of feminist storytelling.

Otros usos (Other Uses, 2014) was filmed on the island of Vieques, which once served as a base for the U.S. armed forces in Puerto Rico. The film simultaneously reveals and conceals, documents and fragments this landscape—thanks to an optical device that the artist developed especially for the film. La cueva negra (The Black Cave, 2012) revolves around the material and spiritual history of the ‘Paso del Indio’, where archaeologically significant traces of early indigenous settlements were found, but then literally entombed under a motorway project. Two young men give voice and expression to the location. Finally, Oriana (2022), inspired by Monique Wittig’s experimental novel Les Guerillères (1969), is an audio-visual improvisation on sensuality and solidarity, on bodies in flux and bodies in resistance, and on the possibilities of a different language. In its open structure, the film echoes the processes of collective study and experimentation which are central to Santiago Muñoz’s working method.

Emily Wardill, whose film Night for Day was awarded the EMAF Media Art Prize last year, is returning with an overview of her moving image works of the past fifteen years. The starting point for Wardill’s films are often historical events or individuals, around which she develops sensual, psychologically charged narratives, in which the instability of language and consciousness, the spectres of technology, and the materiality of memory are recurring themes. Juxtaposing scholarly studies and absurdist puns, political analysis and playful allusions, Wardill creates films that speak a language as suggestive as it is self-willed.

Inspired by medieval church windows and their function as communication media in a largely illiterate society, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007) stages a story about desire, possession, and existence, spectacularly fragmenting it in an improvised-seeming set. Wardill’s first feature-length film, Game Keepers without Game (2009), transposes a piece by Pedro Calderón de la Barca to the London of the present. Against a brilliant white background, the story of a girl who is cast out of her parents’ home unfolds as a sequence of alienated encounters, isolated objects, and transgressive gestures. In I Gave My Love a Cherry that Had no Stone (2016), the foyer of the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon serves as a stage for a choreography in which body, space, and camera are immediately related to each other. In the flowing shifts between pursuing, concealing themselves from, and transforming into one another, the human body is haunted by its doubles—and the museum by the spectres of its future.

Biographies

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (born 1972) lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Recent solo exhibitions include: Oriana in PIVO, São Paulo, the 34th São Paulo Biennial, the Momenta Biennale in Montréal, and Gosila in Der Tank, Basel. Her work is part of public and private collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, Kadist and Guggenheim, among others. She has received a Creative Capital grant, a USA Fellowship, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and the 2021 Artes Mundi Prize, shared among all seven nominees.

Emily Wardill (born 1977) lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal and Malmö, Sweden. She has had solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; Bergen Kunsthall; Salzburger Kunstverein; National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen; The Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; De Appel, Amsterdam; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. Group exhibitions include the 19th Biennale of Sydney; Tate Britain, London; Tate Modern, London; MUMOK, Vienna; The Venice Biennale; MOCA, Miami; Kunsthalle Basel; Kunstverein Stuttgart; ICA, London, among others. She currently undertakes a practice led PhD at Malmö Art Academy.

Accreditation

Registration for accreditation is now possible on our website at registration.emaf.de/en/. The deadline for accreditation is 13 April.

The period for submitting entries for the upcoming edition of EMAF has now ended. Due to the continuing difficult situation, we would like to express our particular gratitude to the artists, distributors and producers who have entrusted their works to us. We look forward to viewing the entries in the weeks to come! The final selection for the film programme, exhibition, performances, and expanded projects will be announced in mid-March.

The EMAF Theme for 2022: The Thing Is

A new year, and a new attempt at moving things and keeping them in motion: following two online editions, EMAF is looking at a new year of the festival with cautious optimism. After retreating into the private sphere, a programme for the public sphere is once again planned: a programme that can be experienced live and also enjoyed in parts digitally. The festival theme will again be central to the programme.

Artistic works and theoretical contributions dealing with our enmeshment in the world of things are brought together under this year’s motto: The Thing Is. The aim is to explore how our shared reality arises from the interplay, the friction and resistances between bodies and things. Since as long as personal relationships are increasingly experienced as disembodied and abstract - not only due to the pandemic - and as long as the ever more complex relationships between people and devices continue shifting the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate and the material foundations for our existence on this planet are at stake, we are confronted with the question of how we can live with things better and perhaps also learn from them.

The exhibition curated by Inga Seidler examines objects of our present time, of everyday life and speculative design. In installations, sculptures, and video works, it asks what constitutes a ‘thing’, and takes a look at quasi-objects and hybrids. Starting from the fact that we are enmeshed with the world of things, the artistic works investigate the nature, production conditions, meanings, functions and design of objects. It thus becomes visible that things facilitate and embody statements about our way of living with others and our environment.

In seven film screenings and a performance, It’s rather a verb, curated by Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, celebrates the relational aspects of the moving image. The programme calls attention to the movements within positions, and to the verbs that support nouns. It highlights works that utilise and perform non-linear processes, as the interaction with things – such as stones, historical objects, mothers and cars – becomes audio-visual.

Things have always supported or testified to interests, needs and actions. Having their own life cycles, they gain or lose significance depending on the particular cultural contexts. The talks curated by Daphne Dragona explore what it means to live with and take care of things from the perspective of different temporalities, ontologies, and worldviews. They examine the role of art and design in creating, appropriating or calling off things in order to maintain or restore substantial relationships to the environment and the planet.

The curators: Inga Seidler lives and works as a curator and cultural producer in Berlin. She has developed, produced, and curated exhibitions, performances, discourse programmes, and digital projects. After several years as a curator of the transmediale festival, she directed the web residency programme at Akademie Schloss Solitude. As part of the curatorial collective connected with the independent project space ACUD MACHT NEU, she initiated the programme COLLECTIVE PRACTICES, which addressed questions regarding collective knowledge production, cultural creation, and organisation. She has curated the EMAF exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück since 2020.

Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat have been working collaboratively for several years and creating works in the audiovisual field. They live and work in Brussels. Sirah and Eitan’s practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work, they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading images - whether moving or still -; the relations between spectatorship and history; and the temporality of narratives and memory and the material surfaces of image production.

Daphne Dragona is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Her topics of interest include the promises of the commons, the instrumentalisation of play, the problematics of care technologies, and the impact of technological infrastructures on the planet. Her exhibitions and events have been hosted at Onassis Stegi, Laboral, Aksioma, NeMe, EMST, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Alta Tecnologia Andina, and Le Lieu Unique. Dragona worked as a curator for the transmediale festival from 2015 to 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 around the world can now submit their works at the European Media Art Festival 2022.

The online platform https://registration.emaf.de/en/ is now open. Works from the fields of film, installation, performance and expanded media can be submitted. The deadline for submissions is 7 January 2022.

The 35th European Media Art Festival will take place from 20 to 24 April 2022. 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 29 May 2022. For more information about the festival, please visit our homepage.

We are pleased to be at your disposal for further questions and interviews.

Film programmes as streaming, live talks in online format - and finally in-person visits to the media art exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück: yesterday, 30 May, the extraordinary hybrid festival edition of the 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) came to a successful close. The festival organisers now draw a positive balance.

“This year we had to be very flexible and very fast,” as EMAF Managing Director Alfred Rotert summed up the situation. “At the start of the festival, an opening of the cinemas was not foreseeable, but shortly before the end we were able to open the EMAF exhibition to festival visitors”. The festival team is very happy because interest did not fail to materialise despite the unfamiliar festival format. “Our hearts were lifted up when the installations curated around the central theme of “Possessed” could be experienced in person by numerous festival visitors at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück after all”, said Alfred Rotert. The new streaming service emaf.cinemlovers.de and the virtual EMAF Talks on the festival homepage were used very intensively throughout the entire period. “The festival edition was a resounding success despite the circumstances”, Rotert added.

Artist talks, the EMAF Talks and other specials on the website at Extras provide a retrospective on the festival. A special insight into the exhibition is provided by filmmaker Tim Kaiser’s documentary on the festival’s homepage.

As soon as we can guarantee more planning security for indoor and outdoor events, the EMAF will provide information about catch-up dates for the film programme and other festival events.

Save the Date: The new festival date for the 35th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) has been set. From 20 to 24 April 2022, the EMAF festival team hopes to welcome audiences on-site once again. We anticipate that the exhibition will be on view until 29 May 2022. As one of the most influential forums for contemporary media art, the 35th EMAF will therefore once again be a field of experimentation and a laboratory in which international artists, curators, researchers, students, and film and art enthusiasts will meet and dialogue.

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) extends its thanks to its sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Foundation of Lower Saxony, the VGH Foundation and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e.V.

With the relaxations passed today by the City of Osnabrück due to the lowered 7-day incidence, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will open starting tomorrow, Friday 21 May, enabling in-person visits to the 34th European Media Art Festival’s (EMAF) “possessed” exhibition. The exhibition, which has so far only been accessible virtually and was put together by EMAF curator Inga Seidler, can now be opened up to the festival public for the first time and is planned to remain on view at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 30 May. Some special rules apply in the Kunsthalle: for instance, a maximum of 25 persons may enter the Kunsthalle at the same time, and visitors may stay only for a maximum of 1.5 hours. No previous registration is necessary for a visit. Guided tours are also not permitted. All visiting regulations, such as access restrictions and compulsory masks in the Kunsthalle, can be found here: https://kunsthalle.osnabrueck.de/de. At the same time, a short documentary by filmmaker Tim Kaiser on the EMAF exhibition “possessed” is now available for viewing. The atmospheric images offer impressions of the installations and exhibition elements as well as their positioning in the Kunsthalle’s exhibition space. The film is accessible on the EMAF homepage and on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/552862866

We wish everyone with an interest a thought-provoking and enjoyable visit to the exhibition!