We are very happy today to give you a first glimpse of this year’s film programmes. A total of 30 short and four feature-length films have been selected from the submissions made to the open call, with these contemporary titles entering into dialogue with three additional historical films. Located between formal experimentation and pop cultural playfulness, looking back in documentary fashion and critical analyses of the present, these works show the versatility of film as an artistic and political medium.

Many of the shorts employ subversive energy and defiant humour to take a stand against prescribed silence and political impotence. What We Said to Brussels Airlines (BE/CD 2026) by the Congolese-Belgian Collectif Faire-Part interrogates the contradictions of artistic commissions in unflinching style: what, for example, is to be done when a Belgian airline offers to show their films, which are deeply rooted in anti-colonial resistance, on their flights? The four artists allow us to participate in their thought processes about the forms of entanglement and possibilities of intervention. Alee Peoples’ Slowest Smile (US 2025) combines images and sounds, theory and song, into an unorthodox attempt to describe the downfall of an empire: from a panoramic image of capitalist exploitation to iconoclastic interventions before a Roman backdrop, from the slowest smile to a sinking ship.

Various films set collective action and the informal sharing of knowledge against the infrastructures that underpin the seeming normality of our present. A Bundle of Silences (PR 2025) by Sofia Gallisá Muriente reconstructs a 1983 bank robbery in which a Puerto Rican revolutionary group made off with several million dollars from an American bank. In an blend of personal recollection, archival footage and film material processed using coffee and tobacco, the work reflects on memory and silence. In Local Sensations (TH 2026), Tulapop Saenjaroen asks how we keep hold of the present and envision the past without recourse to the violence of a monumental order. The film weaves together graphically designed text with footage of collective processes: unstable forms made of glass, musical improvisation and wanderings through public space allow fleeting topographies to be created and counter the monumental with the momentary.

Further short films by: Basma Al-Sharif, Stephanie Barber, Magdalena Bermudez, Arief Budiman, Anouk Chambaz, Lin Htet Aung, Onyeka Igwe, Daniel Jacoby, Juliane Jaschnow & Stefanie Schroeder, José Jiménez, Taufiqurrahman Kifu& Hattie Wade, Vika Kirchenbauer, Martin Moolhuijsen, Zuqiang Peng, Adam Piron, Leonardo Pirondi, Marta Popivoda, Steve Reinke, María Rojas Arias, Viktoria Schmid, Mike Stoltz, Elisabeth Subrin, Maryam Tafakory, Yuliya Tsviatkova, Utkarsh and Saarlotta Virri.

Among the feature-length works, we come across highly personal engagements with places and their afterlives in our embodied and media memory. The starting point for Kamal Aljafari’s most recent documentary is rediscovered MiniDV footage from Gaza shot in 2001. Back then, Aljafari set out in search of a man who he had met while incarcerated in 1989. With Hasan in Gaza (PS/DE/FR/QA 2025) documents his trip from the north to the south of Gaza, accompanied by Hasan, a local travel guide: an encounter whose directness is as urgent as it is tender, with people who resist the violence of the occupation in places that have been destroyed for ever.

The animated feature Bouchra (US/IT/MA 2025) by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki draws on an entirely different cinematic register to tell the story of a young Moroccan filmmaker working on an autobiographical film in New York. Her own life – her artistic search, her romantic attachments, her tense relationship with her mother following her coming out – increasingly merges with that of her film double. Bouchra moves elegantly between times and places, self-interrogation and dialogue, lived experience and how it is processed through narrative.

Different narrative layers also merge in Nicolás Pereda’s Everything Else Is Noise (MX/DE/CA 2026). The film portrays three contemporary composers in Mexico City and what they say about themselves and each other. The shoot for a television interview in the flat of one of the protagonists sets the scene for a chamber piece in which affection and solidarity, respect and rivalry between the three women flow together in amusingly absurdist fashion, rhythmically punctured by power cuts, a barking dog and the sound of the street.

The overtly political dimensions of playing with revealing and camouflaging one’s own person is explored in one of the historical documentaries. Underground (US 1976) by Emile de Antonio, Haskell Wexler and Mary Lampson is based on an interview with leading members of the Weather Underground, a militant group which had committed itself to the overthrow of the US government. Interspersed with archive footage of revolutionary movements worldwide, the protagonists’ testimonies – with their backs facing the camera to protect their identities – come together to form a differentiated portrait that refutes the group’s portrayal in the mass media.

Further feature-length films by: Tenzin Phuntsog, Mohamed Soueid and Chetna Vora.

Expanded Cinema: Unburdened Recollections

This year’s edition of the expanded cinema series Unburdened Recollections also looks back as it continues with a new concept. Initiators Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy have invited curators Mark Toscano and Zena Grey from Los Angeles to show experimental films and videos from the 1960s and 70s over two evenings. The starting point for their programme is Gene Youngblood’s 1970 publication, in which he describes expanded cinema as an art form that doesn’t just liberate film from the restrictions of the cinema setting, but thus also expands our perception and consciousness.

Classics and rediscoveries by: Arlo Acton & Terry Riley, Scott Bartlett, Jordan Belson, Tom DeWitt Ditto, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama & Jud Yalkut, Pat O’Neill, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton, John Schofill, Single Wing Turquoise Bird, Aldo Tambellini, Stan VanDerBeek & Ken Knowlton, James Whitney, John Whitney, and Jud Yalkut & Nam June Paik.

Picture Copyright: Nicolás Pereda

The exhibition An Incomplete Assembly, curated by Inga Seidler, shows current works of media art from around the world largely chosen through the annual public call for entries. The collected positions that comprise the exhibition were produced in the last years and extend from installations via film works all the way to digital interventions.

The thematic starting point of the exhibition is the concept of assembly: the coming together of voices, images, bodies and temporal orders. Wherever such constellations keep reoccurring, processes become ritualised and narratives stabilised, institutional structures are formed. They organise the public realm, regulate participation, mark belonging – and produce exclusion.

Institutions don’t just appear as static constructions or clearly outlined organisations here, but rather as performative ordering principles: as a set of interlinking spatial arrangements, media framings and temporal regimes that structure perception and shape behaviour. The participating artists explore how such ordering principles are produced – through repetitions, synchronisation, narrative codification and the setting of a spatial focus – how they manifest themselves and how they are constantly reproduced each time they are carried out. At the same time, they ask where these structures become brittle and what other forms of coming together become visible in the process.

Robin Kötzle’s two-channel installation Sehen wer wir sein (s|w)ollten analyses how the media constructs political events. Excerpts from the East German TV show Aktuelle Kamera and the West German news programme Tagesschau run in parallel, reporting on protests between 1952 and 1991. When a particular event doesn’t appear in the respective other system, the screen remains black. This formally precise approach allows ideological framings, linguistic codifications and historical gaps to be experienced. What’s visible turns out to be a result of institutional decisions – something that can be created, but just as easily refused.

In Built to Order I, Bethan Hughes casts her gaze on a housing estate in Berlin’s Neukölln district and examines architecture as an object of projection for social ideas. Archival material, found footage and newly shot images unfold on two screens situated opposite from one another, with the interplay between sculptural elements, light and sound providing additional intensity. Hughes shows how surveillance, acts of discipline, projections and racialised attributions are inscribed into built structures. Architecture doesn’t function as a neutral backdrop, but rather as an active co-creator of social order.

Bianca Baldi expands this perspective to include a temporal dimension. In Hear her calendar system a year of thirteen months, her starting point is a photograph of a fig tree in Ethiopia from her family archive. From this, she progressively grapples with administrative and calendar systems from the colonial eras. Video, sketches and a vocal composition become superimposed on linear and cyclical time models. The tree appears both as a more-than-human witness of historical violence and the embodiment of alternative conceptions of time. History becomes legible here not as a closed chronology but rather as a changeable structure.

Sarah Reva Mohr examines power dynamics in social and physical spaces and in relationship to humans and animals. The work sensational view, tired screams also deals with an institutionally organised space: the Barcelona zoo. In this installation, a multi-layered analysis of the zoo unfolds, a place torn between the promise of care and the exertion of power. Different perspectives reveal the regime of the colonial gaze and the aestheticisation of control. The zoo becomes an apparatus in which sight, knowledge and hierarchy intertwine and power relations within society materialise.

In Jarramplas, Yalda Afsah examines a century-old ritual in Piornal, Spain, in which one of the village’s inhabitants puts on a costume and has carrots thrown at them by the crowd. This film work focuses on the structure of assembly: on the intensity of bodies connected in space, on collective action and the dynamics created when individual gestures become synchronised within a group. By keeping essential elements of what’s happening outside the frame, Afsah shifts the focus away from a folkloristic narrative on to the mechanisms which form community.

With the Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland, the Alternative Monument collective shifts their engagement with institutionalised memory into the public and digital realm. Their augmented reality project doesn’t possess a permanent physical form, but is activated in each individual situation via mobile devices instead. Visual collages, sculptural elements and sound fragments connect individual narratives of migration, exile and displacement. The monument isn’t erected through materiality or duration here, but rather by collective actualisation. Memory can be experienced as a polyphonic process that resists any final fixed form.

As part of the Talks programme curated by Franziska PIerwoss, a workshop put on with the Alternative Monument collective opens up an “Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland” as a living platform for exchange and experimentation - and will explore together with the participants how a contemporary monument to migration can be developed in public space despite structural restrictions.

The works that make up An Incomplete Assembly show institutions as choreographies of images, bodies and time structures which direct behaviour and organise belonging. By revealing media blind spots, architectural inscriptions, temporal patterns and memory political emphases, they open up spaces in which order doesn’t appear as a given, but rather as something to be negotiated.

Picture Copyright: Bianca Baldi

In its Artist in Focus series, EMAF presents the cinematic work of prominent contemporary artists, at times in dialogue with other films or contributions related to their work. This year, we are featuring a body of work by the Lebanese-born, Berlin-based artist Marwa Arsanios (born 1978). By doing so, we are honouring an internationally acclaimed artistic practice, where film, research, political imagination, and critical intervention are closely interwoven.

At the heart of the programme is the ongoing five-part film series Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (since 2017). Here, Arsanios accompanies feminist collectives and initiatives in Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Colombia whose ongoing struggle for land communalisation and recuperation is inextricably linked to their fight for self-determination. Through an ongoing conversation, Arsanios portrays women practising collective, anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal forms of coexistence in rural regions, defending traditional land use practices against privatisation and colonial occupation, or campaigning for the restoration of historical commons. Knowledge transfer, solidarity and support are essential to these processes and are reflected in the use of the medium of film.

The most recent, fifth part of the series, Right of Passage (2026), unfolds in the dream space where the boundaries that define property and territory, that separate the human and the non-human, past and present, are suspended. This permeability enables different “political animals” to pass freely, facilitating the articulation of traumatic losses and enabling new alliances to form.

In dialogue with her own work, Arsanios presents films by Simone Bitton, Mohammad Malas, and Reem Shilleh. These are complemented and expanded upon through workshops, readings, and talks with Ali AlAdawy, Haytham El Wardany, and Stefanie Baumann. Arsanios outlines the guiding questions as follows:

“How can we learn from films that emanate from the ground and are grounded in land struggles, that also become in and of themselves pedagogical objects? What filmic forms are constituted according to the topography of a place, its geographies and soils? And how, in its turn, does the film set become a pedagogical space for these struggles?”

As in her earlier works, Arsanios reflects on the cinematic image and her own implication in the processes of image-making, merging documentary and fictional storytelling, militant filmmaking, and artistic intervention. In Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila (2014), we encounter the legendary Algerian revolutionary Djamila Bouhired in various incarnations across different media. Using Bouhired’s iconic image as a starting point, Arsanios considers how socialist projects and national liberation movements of the past have either promoted or marginalised feminist groups. In Amateurs, Stars and Extras or Labor of Love (2018), the film set becomes a place where the invisible forms of reproductive labour that lend stability and permanence to the capitalist system are brought to the fore. In complexly constructed, staged and documentary scenes, women in Mexico and Lebanon discuss work, leisure, and resistance.

Biography:

Marwa Arsanios’ practice centres around structural questions. From architectural spaces, their transformation and adaptability, to artist-run spaces and temporary conventions, her practice tends to make space within and parallel to existing art structures, allowing experimentation with different forms of assemblies. Her most recent solo shows include: Haus für Kunst Uri (2026), Joan Miro Foundation (2025), Artium Museum (2025), BAK Utrecht (2024), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022) and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021). She participated in numerous international group shows such as Documenta 15 (2022), the Sydney Biennial (2022), the 11th Berlin Biennale (2020) and the Gwangju Biennial (2018). Her films are regularly shown at international film festivals.

Picture Copyright: Mariam Mekawi

In about three months, the 39th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück. Today, we would like to inform you about this year’s thematic focus: An Incomplete Assembly.

Institutions strive to organise volatile relations, such as power, work, privileges, language and emotions, as efficiently as possible, in order to establish a permanent order. What benefits do they offer, to whom, and at whose expense? And under what conditions are they prepared to change this order once it has been established? These questions also arise in relation to the role and responsibility of cultural institutions. Not only have massive attacks on artistic freedom called into question the legitimacy of these institutions, but they have also revealed the inequalities and exclusions within the cultural landscape. It can be assumed that the codes of conduct, mission statements, and other written commitments with which an increasing number of cultural institutions present themselves to the public articulate an external pressure to clarify their ethics and programmes, as well as an internal uncertainty within the institutions themselves. Is there a world beyond institutionalisation, or an alternative set of codes, agreements and forms of assembly? How might these play out in the context of art and cultural work?

As part of this year’s thematic focus, An Incomplete Assembly, we will use a variety of events, including talks, exhibitions, film programmes, performances, and workshops, to explore the capabilities of institutions: what statements, attitudes and actions they enable, but also what they overlook, ignore or actively prevent; how the standardisation of language, bodies, spaces, and time reinforces existing structures, and how artistic and non-artistic movements respond to these normative demands.

Curated by Inga Seidler, the exhibition views institutions as “performative ensembles,” choreographed processes, and collective entities comprising roles, rhythms, and unspoken agreements that can be interpreted, modified, interrupted and improvised. The presented works use movement, music, and communal situations to reveal these structures, rendering them physically and temporally tangible. They explore the spaces and possibilities that arise when processes come to a standstill, roles are challenged, and codes are interrupted or changed. In doing so, they demonstrate how institutional systems standardise behaviour and organise affiliations, yet remain malleable and susceptible to disruption.

The film programme on this theme, curated by Ana Vaz, thinks beyond the confinement of the cinematic to its reception in the form of finalised works. It is devoted to investigating practices that assume and question processes of making not as a means to an end, but rather as constitutive to the works. It is a series that aims to look beyond representation into the very conditions of the apparition of moving images — be they cinematic or performative. It considers the agency of its makers, participants and users, establishing connections between on and offscreen, the stage and the backstage. Here, cinema becomes rather a mode of attention, of attunement, and of collective making, a means for the rehearsal of desirable and furious futures.

This year’s talks and workshops, curated by Franziska Pierwoss, take a hands-on look at the everyday realities of cultural work. Aimed at filmmakers, curators, organisers, and students alike, the programme focuses on how we work – on the ground, in process, and in relation to one another. While we are well-versed in critiquing the counter productivity of institutions – rightly so – this programme asks a different question: what might productive responses look like? To censorship, institutional cowardice and collective fatigue? Highlighting practices that intervene directly – such as digitally claiming public space and confronting entrenched hegemonies – the programme invites audiences to organise within existing frameworks while also bending them.

In their series “What Is Needed,” Raquel Schefer and Philip Widmann explore the “Mostra Internacional de Cinema de Intervenção,” a festival that took place in post-revolutionary Portugal in 1976. It was a unique effort to connect movements of liberation and emancipation. The festival’s combination of militant films from the Global North and South suggests that cinema’s potential for intervention was essentially indebted to Third-Worldist networks of audiovisual independence. Through the lens of the five decades that have passed since the Mostra, “What Is Needed” looks at the contradictions of integrating “intervention” into the institutions of a post-fascist, liberal democratic society that, contrary to all claims, sustains Western supremacy. The series is a collaboration with Doc’s Kingdom and the Paranational Cinema – Legacies & Practices project at the University of Zurich.

About the curators:

Franziska Pierwoss is an artist working with performance and installation. Her projects explore food systems as political symbols and materials within social and financial spheres. She studied in Leipzig and Beirut and has shown work at Sharjah Biennial, nGbK, Jameel Arts Centre and Urbane Künste Ruhr.

Raquel Schefer is a filmmaker, a film programmer, and an Associate Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. She is a co-editor-in-chief of La Furia Umana journal, and a former programme advisor for the IDFA and Encuentros del otro cine (EDOC) festivals.

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

Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker. Her film-poems interrogate cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of transforming human perception. They highlight the profound contradictions of our time and question, above all, the destructive practices of colonial modernity.

Philip Widmann is a researcher, programmer and filmmaker, currently working in the project Paranational Cinema—Legacies & Practices at the University of Zurich. He edited Film Undone—Elements of a Latent Cinema, a collection of approaches to unmade and unfinished films.

The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue beyond the festival, closing on 25 May 2026.

Media artists from around the world can now enter their work to be considered for the 2026 European Media Art Festival. The online platform is already open at https://emaf.filmchief.com/entry-forms This year’s deadline for entries is 22 December 2025.

We welcome current works in the categories Film (experimental short and feature films), Installation (installative, interactive, spatial or sculptural media art works), and Expanded (performances, live events, or workshops). Entering works is free of charge.

Our international curatorial team will compile the programme for the upcoming festival from the entries received. Fees will be paid to all artists whose work is selected for the festival. Premiere status is not necessary. Please refer to our regulations for more details on the entry and selection process, as well as technical requirements.

The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will continue beyond the festival, closing on 25 May 2026.

We are happy to answer any questions and arrange interviews. If you are interested, please contact presse@emaf.de.

After five days, the 38th European Media Art Festival comes to an end today. More than 160 films, installations, performances, and talks were shown and experienced at nine different locations across the city. One of the highlights was the presentation of the EMAF Media Art Prize by the German Film Critics Association at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück this morning. Daphné Hérétakis was awarded for her work What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move (GR, FR 2024, 31’).

The film deals with the current political situation in Greece: in Athens, nothing seems to be happening, and the people are as silent as statues. But elsewhere in the city, a caryatid escapes from the museum and a splinter group calls for the destruction of all antiquities. Perhaps filmmaking is the only way to avoid turning to stone, says the synopsis.

The jury, consisting of Günter Minas, Bianca Jasmina Rauch and Hannes Wesselkämper, stated: “With anarchic humour while oscillating between documentary and fiction, the director follows a (fictitious) citizens’ initiative that wants to subvert the past by blowing up the Parthenon in Athens and replacing it with statues of people from the present day. The stagnation caused by the current political situation is transformed into a new movement, centuries-old traditions are thrown overboard with a sense of mischievous joy. Thus, What we ask of a statue is that it doesn’t move cleverly poses the question in the cinematic space: What traces of us will archaeologists of the future find?” A special mention goes to Crispin Yanisi for “Tila•pia.”

Both films were previously shown in the International Selection. This year, for the first time, all 31 films screened will receive the EMAF Award. The prize money will be divided equally among the selected artists, in addition to the usual screening fee. The winners are:

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ben Balcom, George Clark, Theo Cuthand, Chloë Delanghe & Mattijs Driesen, Sam Drake, Eitan Efrat & Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Zachary Epcar, Kevin Jerome Everson, Laurence Favre, Maïder Fortuné, Daphné Hérétakis, Mina Heydari-Waite, Hyejin Jung, Ferney Iyokina Gittoma, Pranami Koch, Mónica Martins Nunes, Ella McConnell, Monica Panzarino, Franca Pape, Kanthy Peng, Martyna Ratnik, Jazmin Rojas Forero, Sylvia Schedelbauer, Silke Schönfeld, Lina Selander, Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, Micah Weber, Helena Wittmann, Crispin Yanisi and Else/Xun Zhang

More information on the films is available here.

On the opening night alone, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück welcomed over 900 visitors. We were delighted to receive so many visitors who attended the EMAF for the first time, as well as those who have been our guests for decades.

The exhibition “Witnessing Witnessing,” curated by Inga Seidler, can be visited at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück until 25 May during the museum’s regular opening hours. Guided tours take place every Sunday at 4 pm and can also be booked at presse@emaf.de.

Thank you for your interest and we look forward to seeing you next year! The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from 22 to 26 April 2026. We would be happy to send you pictures of the awards ceremony, the festival and the individual works on request. Please contact presse@emaf.de.

In the festival section Campus, classes and subject groups from art schools and universities present their current work. Students from Helsinki, Szczecin, Braunschweig and Osnabrück are our guests at this year’s EMAF and will be showing the fruits of their labour in exhibitions, film programmes and performances at the festival cinemas and selected venues in the centre of Osnabrück.

The HBK Braunschweig exhibition presents works by students of fine art and art pedagogy. Films, videos, sculptures, performances and installations examine the connection between individual experiences and social and political contexts, focussing on different perspectives on questions of witnessing.

It Will Be a Very Difficult Conversation is a short film by students from the Academy of Art in Szczecin which seeks to express what we lack words for in everyday life: how do we engage with conflicts in our immediate surroundings? How can I produce critical art that perhaps leads to restrictions for those closest to me? How do I manage when a war splits the community that I come from?

In their film and performance event Ensemble, students of the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki explore fundamental questions relating to the shared experience of images and spaces. For a limited period, doors open that lead us to a home, to the sea or to the surface of skin. Voices, soundscapes and the light of the projectors lead the audience into the space and the time of their imagination.

The Institute for Art/Art Pedagogy at the Osnabrück University is participating with works created in collaboration with different artists. They seek to make us aware of human boundaries in information processing and the psychological and social effects of false information and information saturation.

Students from the media laboratory at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences are presenting projects that draw on virtual reality, AI or physical computing to engage with the strategies of political manipulation, the modelling and tactile exploration of landscape and new forms of playful interaction.

At the Department for Everyday Records established by the Music and Art School Osnabrück, the citizen’s personal records are systematically administered and ordered by staff. Personal everyday records such as notes, receipts or contact lens packets can be handed in by citizens at the relevant office. 



Until April 18 film and art professionals can register to visit the festival here. The complete festival programme can be found here.



We look forward to your visit!

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

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

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

Technologies

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

Magic

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

Continuities

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

Bodies

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

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

We look forward to your visit!

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

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

International Selection

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

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

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

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

Feature films

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

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

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

EMAF Extended

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

SPECTRAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the curators:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reorientation of Prizes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theme: Feelers, Sensors

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

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

Film Programmes

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

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

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

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

Exhibition: Feelers, Sensors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accreditations are still possible until 19 April.

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

Picture Copyright: Alma Bech

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

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

International Competition

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

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

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

Artist in Focus

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

Expanded Cinema & Performance

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

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

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

Picture copyright: Phil Collins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture Copyright: EMAF/ Rita Macedo

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

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

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

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

Curators’ statements and bios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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