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.

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.

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 and at Vimeo.

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!

After twelve days of film programmes on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de the organisers of the 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) have drawn a positive balance: The demand for festival passes and accreditations was very high, and the continuous and intensive use of the streaming site indicates a lively interest in the range of films on offer at this year’s EMAF, confirms Katrin Mundt, film programme director. “We are very pleased, not least because the hits were broadly spread geographically, confirming the EMAF’s high importance for the international media art scene.” More than 60 per cent of the hits came from outside Germany. The competition entries and feature-length films were viewed particularly frequently, followed by the curated short film programmes. “The lively participation in the EMAF Talks and Artist Conversations also shows that our visitors engaged intensively with the content of the contributions and that the programme conveyed valuable impulses,” says Katrin Mundt. “Setting up the online film programme was a considerable challenge for our team. That’s why we’re even more pleased with the positive feedback we’ve received in the last few days, and we’re looking forward to making real-life festival experiences possible again next year.”

The festival’s media art exhibition can be visited online until 30 May: the artists exhibiting under the theme “possessed” offer insights into their work on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de. In addition, documentaries and film tours of the exhibition will be presented successively in the coming days. For International Museum Day, EMAF curator Inga Seidler is offering an online guided tour of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück on 16 May at 3 pm. It will be held via Zoom and requires registration at presse@emaf.de by 14 May.

The class of art students from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig /Braunschweig University of Fine Arts participating in this year’s EMAF is putting on a special offer in the festival’s Campus section: In daily Artist Talks, they will offer insights into the works they created for the festival, inquiring into connections between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the political and the private, their own privileges and discrimination. You can follow the “Campus #smalltalks” on their own channel via the link www.emaf.de/sektionen/#section_4 until Sunday, 9 May.

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 Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V..

Warmest greetings from your EMAF 2021 team

The EMAF juries distinguish three groundbreaking experimental films

The 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) have been announced: The EMAF Award for a groundbreaking work in media art goes to the British artist Emily Wardill for her experimental film “Night for Day”, which discusses the dialectic of utopian thinking as exemplified by a mother-son relationship in Portugal.

The Dialogue Award for the promotion of intercultural exchange goes to Ana Vaz, Vera Amaral and Mário Neto for their film “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, in which they explore the essence of cinema through their own observations.

“Michael Ironside and I” by German artist Marian Mayland wins the Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (VdFk). The essay film critically investigates film and television history via media images of masculinity in the 80s and 90s.

All award-winning films, as well as the entire film programme of the 34th EMAF, can be seen on the streaming platform www.emaf.cinemalovers.de up to and including 2 May.

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Award are presented by a jury of media artists and curators, which this year includes Christina Li, Nour Ouayda and Claudia Slanar. The film critics Dunja Bialas, Tina Waldeck and Jan Künemund make up the jury for the EMAF Media Art Award of the VdFk.

The EMAF prize is awarded to “a poignant work that explores the power of cinema as a tool to time travel, and to create imaginary kinship across generations”. “Almost as a counterpoint to the precision afforded by current image technology, Wardill expertly employs light and shadow as a filmic device that points to the opaque and fractal nature of historic narratives as well as present realities.”

The EMAF Awards jury extends an honourable mention to “Happy Valley” by Chinese-American director Simon Liu: „A collage of surreal and material observations of the city, set against a soundscape of 80s Hong Kong pop songs and soap operas, it evokes a deep sense of longing for a common experience, and is a celebration of a survival instinct that is fundamentally human and universal”.

The Dialogue Award for “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Ana Vaz, Vera Amaral and Mário Neto distinguishes “…a remarkable exercise in unschooling founded upon intergenerational rapport and curiosity, where they jointly explore ways of seeing beyond sight. By doing so, filmmaking becomes a performative and sensory practice that involves the entire body. The film’s evocative soundscape and use of multi-vocality adds to the layered texture of the film that is underpinned by the present discourses of care and generosity, as we witness these young filmmakers investigate the relations between the visible and invisible, the sensible and insensible facts that will constitute how they view the world”, thus the jury.

The experimental film “Letter From Your Far-Off Country” by Indian-American filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri receives an honourable mention from the Dialogue Award jury. The work evokes “the power of communication through letters that connects the protagonists of emancipatory struggles in India through almost half a century. In ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ Suneil Sanzgiri explores how historic events can be turned into performative gestures which then inform present and future tactics in fighting oppression and censorship. He follows the images and sounds of revolutionary moments by bringing different sources such as analogue video, 16mm footage and digital renderings together thereby not only destabilizing a linear historic narration but also blurring the boundaries of experimentation in cinema”.

With “Michael Ironside and I” by Marian Mayland, the EMAF Media Art Awards Jury of the Association of German Film Critics distinguishes “a complex essayistic examination of film and television history. In the flowing montage of found genre images, traces of toxic masculinity become visible that do not permit nostalgic transfiguration. Nonetheless, the author’s cinephile sensitivity remains the fuel of (self-)reflection”.

The full-length jury statements as a video are available at: https://emaf.cinemalovers.de/en/navigation/awards

Written information can be found at: https://www.emaf.de/en/timetable/

All award winners can be seen until 2 May at: https://emaf.cinemalovers.de/en/navigation/film

The exhibition of the 34th EMAF is on until 30 May at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. You can find out more about the exhibition at www.emaf.de. We will inform you about virtual insights into the exhibition shortly. As soon as the Osnabrück pandemic regulations permit, we may be able to open the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

The media art works of the EMAF Campus section can currently be seen in Osnabrück until 9 May in the windows of the Kunstraum hase29, the BBK Kunstquartier and in the windows of the University of Osnabrück in the Seminarstraße. The objects, installations and videos were created by students of Hochschule für Künste Bremen, Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Braunschweig, Institut für Kunst|Kunstpädagogik der Universität Osnabrück and Hochschule Osnabrück. Only the works of the Hochschule für Kunst Bremen in the hase29 art space will be dismantled on 29 May, following which the works of the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Braunschweig will be presented there.

We offer our sincere thanks to our sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

Best regards from the EMAF team 2021

presse@emaf.de

The 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) is open. Starting today, Wednesday 21 April, festival visitors and accredited persons can access an extensive festival programme from the sections Exhibition, Film and Campus on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de. The complete online programme will be available up to and including 2 May, supplemented by numerous accompanying events such as conversations with artists, making-ofs, virtual tours and talks (see below for dates). To the extent that the Corona measures of the city of Osnabrück permit, there will also be onsite opportunities to visit the EMAF exhibition set up until 30 May in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück as well as works by art academies in the Campus section at Coronacompliant exhibition venues in the city. The EMAF will provide daily information on this.

Film programme In this year’s film programme, the 34th European Media Art Festival presents over 120 contributions from 31 countries, which can be viewed on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de from today until 2 May. To facilitate an exchange with the filmmakers and discussions on media art in a festival atmosphere despite the Corona pandemic, the EMAF programme team and the guest curators have conducted in-depth “Artist Conversations” in advance, which are now available online to accompany the films. The EMAF plans to catch up on selected film programmes in cooperation with domestic and foreign partners as soon as public cinema screenings are possible again. emaf.cinemalovers.de

Exhibition The EMAF exhibition curated by Inga Seidler takes the festival theme “possessed” as its starting point and explores the meanings of possession and obsession in today’s world in the form of seven installations by international artists, which have been set up in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. An opening to the public will take place as soon as the Corona measures of the city of Osnabrück permit. A virtual visit to the exhibition will be possible for festival visitors: on the festival’s streaming platform, a making-of and a virtual tour, among other things, can be enjoyed in the “Exhibition” section. The EMAF will inform festival visitors, as soon as the virtual visit of the exhibition is opened. emaf.cinemalovers.de

Talks Invited theorists, artists and activists will speak in six virtual discussion rounds curated by Daphne Dragona and Alfred Rotert on selected thematic focuses within the framework of the EMAF, for instance on the similarities between economies based on burning fossil energies and colonial large-scale plantations, on technoheritage and cultural dispossession, on the labour force working in secrecy and slavery, on digital habits and collective trauma. The talks will be streamed live on the EMAF website and will be available later here on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de. This year’s EMAF Talks in detail:

Thursday, 22 April 17:00 Against Cultural Dispossession: Performing Bodies and Machines 19:00 Petrochemical Legacies of Possession and Haunting

Friday, 23 April 17:00 Against Colonialism within New Digital Regimes 19:00 Rethinking Data Possession: Towards Machine Learning and a Precognitive Mode of Black Existence

Saturday, 24. April 17:00 Against the Plantationocene: Black Ecologies and Environmental Justice 19:00 Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness www.emaf.de

Campus The festival section Campus offers a platform to classes and specialist groups from European academies and universities. Due to Corona, these will be available mainly on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, but also on site in Osnabrück in the windows of the hase 29 art space, in the windows of the Institute for Art/Art Education in Seminarstraße and in the window of the bbk art quarter. emaf.cinemalovers.de

Specials To make possible festival moments of the social kind, the EMAF invites all festival visitors to the virtual party “Bal Masqué” on Saturday, 24 April 2021. In addition, the performance kit “Soft Prison” by the artist duo OJOBOCA, which can be ordered by parcel delivery to your home, offers an exceptional opportunity to be performer and audience at the same time. “My flesh is in tension, and I eat it” is a Mail Art project by artists Teo Ala-Ruona and Jaakko Pallasvuo that references the film programme “The New Death”, curated by Steve Reinke and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The two editions can be ordered directly via the festival. emaf.cinemalovers.de

Catalogue & Timetable The 34. European Media Art Festival’s (EMAF) catalogue can be ordered at the mail address presse@emaf.de and downloaded from the following website: www.emaf.de/files A timetable for the entire festival is available here: www.emaf.de/timetable

Tickets & Service Tickets for the online programme are now available online at emaf.cinemalovers.de. Visitors can register there and purchase a festival pass. Online group tickets are also available this year, valid for up to 20 people. All available films, conversations with filmmakers and documentaries will be available for your enjoyment during the period 21.04.-02.05.2021, with no time limit. We are pleased to announce that the majority of the films will be available worldwide without geo-blocking. The festival’s Talks and other special programmes will be held via Zoom, for which you can register as a discussion participant. The Talks (all in English) will also be available free of charge via stream on our website. www.emaf.de/en/service

Accreditation Accreditation is possible for artists, curators and speakers involved in the programme. This includes access to the online programme as well as the right to free entry to the festival events, provided they can be held. Accreditations are also possible for institutions, distributors, festivals, etc. Please find all modalities for accreditations to this year’s EMAF here: www.emaf.de/en/service

The European Media Art Festival (EMAF) extends its sincere thanks to its sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH Stiftung and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V. With best wishes and warmest greetings from the EMAF 2021 team www.emaf.de

This year, EMAF is offering a series of outstanding participation projects to enable festival visitors to actively take part in the 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF), and to provide encounters with dialogue on media art, despite our hybrid version in these Corona times: In addition to the film programmes and media art works presented on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, visitors can join workshop discussions with the artists and talks on selected key festival topics. What’s more, EMAF invites you to the virtual party “Bal Masqué” on Saturday, 24 April 2021. The performance kit “Soft Prison” by the artist duo OJOBOCA, which can be ordered by parcel delivery to your home, offers an exceptional opportunity to be both performer and audience at the same time. “My flesh is in tension, and I eat it” is a Mail Art project by the artists Teo Ala-Ruona and Jaakko Pallasvuo that references the film programme “The New Death”, curated by Steve Reinke and Jaakko Pallasvuo. The two editions can be ordered directly via the festival.

Bal Masqué on Saturday, 24 April 2021, 20:00 PM

The Bal Masqué is a virtual club night and a Corona-proof combination of an online dance battle, a digital masked ball and any number of individual VJ sets, which is offered exclusively during the 34th EMAF in cooperation with IMPAKT. You are all invited to wear your craziest digital or real masks and party with us! If you prefer, you can join the party completely anonymously behind your mask, but you can also choose to take centre stage and join one of the battles that we will arrange during the Bal Masqué. The battles are the ball’s highlights, in which three participants at a time compete for the prize for the most amazing background and mask performance. The Bal Masqué breaks down the divide between audience members and participants. Access is free of charge after registration at https://impakt.nl/events/2021/party/bal-masque-x-emaf/.

Soft Prison

In times when attending a festival in person is not an option, the home performance kit “Soft Prison” offers you an opportunity to experience a unique live performance at home instead. With the aid of a simple object and step-by-step instructions, your own body becomes the ultimate performer. The kit includes a phosphorescent 35mm slide, illustrated instructions and an accompanying box. You can order it directly from the festival at presse@emaf.de and it will be sent by post. Cost: 10,00 EUR plus shipping.



My flesh is in tension, and I eat it

“My flesh is in tension, and I eat it” was originally a performance that premiered in Helsinki in 2021. This letter is a revised part of the performance script, written and translated into English by Teo Ala-Ruona and illustrated by Jaakko Pallasvuo. It dialogues with the film programme “The New Death”, curated by Steve Reinke and Jaakko Pallasvuo for EMAF. You can order the letter directly via the festival by writing to presse@emaf.de, and it will be sent to you by post. Cost: 5,00 EUR plus postage.



Talks and Conversations with Artists


The 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) offers an extensive online programme with background discussions and expert talks to accompany the film programmes and the festival focus “Possessed”, which visitors with festival tickets or accreditation can access and enjoy from 21 April at emaf.cinemalovers.de.



We offer our sincere thanks to our sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

In this year’s hybrid version of the European Media Art Festival (EMAF), the Talks and Campus sections feature a series of media art discussions on the festival’s focus “Possessed”, as well as a selection of current works in which specialised media art groups from European art academies present their perspectives. You can engage with the programmes for the most part on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, but they will also be shown in the windows of exhibition venues in Osnabrück’s old town, depending on current Corona pandemic regulations.

The Talks at this year’s European Media Art Festival (EMAF) address the question of what “ownership” and “possession” mean in today’s world and investigate their potential interrelationships. “The speakers will discuss issues of ownership and control in the context of land, identity and information,” explains curator Daphne Dragona, who is responsible for the talks programme. “In the process, they also address the power of belief systems, customs and dominant narratives. At the centre of the programme is the connection between today’s forms of extractivism and exploitation - whether of mineral resources, human labour or data - and the colonialism of the settlers, racialised capitalism”.

In six virtual discussion rounds, the participating theorists, artists and activists will discuss, among other things, the similarities between economies based on the burning of fossil fuels and colonial plantations, technoheritage and cultural dispossession, today’s hidden workforce and slavery, digital habits and collective trauma. Special emphasis is placed on the incessant struggle of resistant networks and ecologies. Artists Nora Al-Badri and Lerato Shadi, among others, discuss strategies for countering cultural dispossession.

Heather Davis and Regine Rapp take up the role of plastic in our lives today. The binaries of human/machine and race/subjugation are central to the discussion by Dr Ramon Amaro and Maya Indira Ganesh. Ariana Dongus and Tiara Roxanne examine data colonialism. Black ecology and the connections between climate change and colonialism are the topics in the talk by Jacqueline Brown and Sria Chatterjee. And Liam Young joins us on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city made up of the earth’s entire population. 
“By reflecting on ancestral and contemporary technologies and cultural practices, the EMAF 2021 Talks programme underscores the continuing need for a differentiated perception of the world that will enable us to inhabit this planet in a different way,” says curator Daphne Dragona.

The entire EMAF Talks programme is available at www.emaf.de.

The festival section EMAF Campus is once again offering a platform to classes and specialist groups from European academies and universities in this festival year. Due to Corona, these will feature for the most part on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, but also on-site in Osnabrück in the windows of the hase 29 art space, in the windows of the Institut für Kunst|Kunstpädagogik /Institute for Art/Art Education in the Seminarstraße and in the window of the bbk art quarter.

The classes of Julika Rudelius from the Hochschule für Kunst Bremen and Candice Breitz & Eli Cortiñas from the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Braunschweig will present installations, performances and videos, while the class of Katarina Zdjelar from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam will be represented with a video programme.

The Institut für Kunst|Kunstpädagogik /Institute for Art|Art Education at the University of Osnabrück will also feature videos from the modules of Bettina Bruder and Barbara Kaesbohrer, and the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences will present apps and videos from the Media& Interaction Design course, supervised by Christoph Mett, Hannes Nehls, Björn Plutka and Michaela Ramm.

We offer our sincere thanks to our sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

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

The streaming offer will be online from 21 April - 02 May and will include conversations with artists, live talks and insights into the exhibitions, in addition to the film programmes. “As soon as public screenings are possible, we will present a number of films once again in physical form,” says Katrin Mundt, member of the EMAF management team.

With over 2,600 submissions, more artists than ever before applied for inclusion in the EMAF programme; 31 films were selected for the competition. “Many of these films deal with landscapes marked by the traces of historical occupations or current conflicts,” says Katrin Mundt, who is in charge of the film programme. “The artists’ stance can be very critical, but also very personal. And often they are looking for alternatives: for other models of the world and new forms of community life.”

Marwa Arsanios’ Who Is Afraid of Ideology? Part 3: Micro-Resistances (2020), for example, tells of the struggle for land and mineral resources in Colombia and the empowerment of indigenous women through the dissemination of ecological knowledge. Simon Liu’s Happy Valley (2020) combines traces of the protests in his home city of Hong Kong into a melancholic tour through a city in the process of disappearing. Other works revolve around the close connection between body, place and identity. In Daddy’s Boy (2020), Renèe Helèna Browne examines the role of father figures in finding one’s own identity. The Hollywood classic Jurassic Park provides Browne with arguments for a different, “monstrous” way of being in the world. And Marian Mayland’s Michael Ironside and I (2020) also searches the film sets of 1980s and 90s sci-fi productions for notions of a technologically expanded masculinity.

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

The festival theme “Possessed” is spotlighted by a series curated by Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy (Berlin). Titled “The Unpossessable Possessor”, it focuses on the cinematic apparatus: how is it connected to us humans, how it takes possession of us.

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

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

Up-to-date information on this will be published on our website.

The 34th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück in a few weeks. However, we cannot currently guarantee under which conditions a visit in person to the festival will be possible under the Corona guidelines in force at the end of April. We are therefore also preparing online formats that will enable a virtual visit. At the same time, of course, we are planning for the visit as usual - this also applies to this year’s EMAF exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, which is entitled “possesed” and curated by Berlin curator Inga Seidler.

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

One highlight among others is the altar-like video installation “Madre Drone” by the Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez: It fuses myths, symbols and rituals with images of extraction and indigenous land rights, cultural appropriation and the destruction of nature through industrialisation. Nora Al Badri’s work, entitled “Babylonian Vision”, interrogates contemporary museum practices by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate synthetic Babylonian objects based on antiquities. What it means to have no history and thus no future culminates in the video “Motlhaba Wa Re KeNamile”, which Lerato Shadi shot in her hometown Lotlhakane (Botswana): The work is reminiscent of the so-called slave masks that white slave owners put over the heads of their dehumanised workers. Pedro Neves Marquez examines histories of colonisation through the lens of biotechnology, pointing out how closely the colonisation of peoples is linked to the colonisation of land and to control over biological reproduction as a whole. With his large-scale map of new extractivism Vladan Joler explores and visualises a range of technical and social aspects of contemporary phenomena at the intersection of technology and society. One of the theses that artist Johannes Paul Raether works with in the guise of “Protektorama, the World Healing Witch”, is that humanity, obsessed with the principles of capital, is mutating into a prosthetic of its own digital devices.

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

Up-to-date information on this will be published on our website.

At present, thousands of visitors at a festival, as was usual at the European Media Art Festival before the Corona pandemic, is not even remotely conceivable. Our curators are therefore planning various online formats in addition to the events and exhibitions in our real space. They will be available online from April 21 - at emaf.cinemalovers.de. The films, installations and talks will be available beyond the duration of the festival until May 2.

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

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

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

“The EMAF traditionally has a very international audience. Through the online programme, we can make as many films and contributions as possible accessible to a broad audience - without anyone having to get on a train or a plane”, says Alfred Rotert, member of the festival management.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We would have loved to provide you with information about our programme for the International Short Film Day on 21 December! But sometimes more important things come up, which is why the Short Film Day unfortunately has to be cancelled this year. In these times of more stringent Corona regulations, we extend our solidarity to the cinemas and other cultural institutions that have had to close down.

Last Call for Entries - Deadline: 31 December, 2020

You still have until the end of the year to submit your works for the EMAF 2021 screening – at: submissions.emaf.de. We look forward to receiving your films, videos, installations, performance projects and works from the field of Expanded Media!

Lichte Momente - Body Hacking

For those of you who happen to be in Osnabrück over the festive season, it is definitely worth your while to take a stroll through the old town, where the outdoor media art project “Lichte Momente” can be seen until 31 December.

Entitled Body Hacking, the project places the much-discussed topic of “posthuman bodies” at the hub of artistic debate: body hackers, for instance, have RFID chips surgically implanted under their skin, which they use to unlock doors, unlock smartphones or store data. By taking chemical substances and hormones, they optimise their bodies - and in doing so reduce all normative categories to absurdity.

In their aesthetic positions, this year’s artists Stine Deja, Eva Papamargariti, Filip Ćustić and Younghee Shin encircle, question and reflect on the theme of body hacking and approach it in serious, poetic, ironic or humorous ways.

We wish you all happy and above all healthy holidays and all the best for the New Year!

EMAF 2021 will begin in five months, and despite these uncertain times of the Corona pandemic, we are looking ahead and working on a festival edition that will not only present our familiar, carefully curated film programmes, installations, live works and talks in Osnabrück, but will also take into account the special demands of the present moment with digital offerings. We will keep you informed over the coming months about details of our programme planning and new team members. Today we would like to introduce our new selection committee:

New Film Selection Committee

A warm welcome to our new selection committee! Eli Cortiñas, Mason Leaver-Yap and Philip Widmann, together with film section director Katrin Mundt, make up the curatorial team that will develop the competition and feature film programmes of EMAF 2021 in the coming months and present them at the festival.

Eli Cortiñas currently holds the professorship for Spatial Concepts at the HBK Braunschweig together with Prof. Candice Breitz. Her films and installations have been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Museum Ludwig, Kunsthalle Budapest, CAC Vilnius, SCHIRN Kunsthalle, SAVVY Contemporary, Museum Marta Herford, Centre Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art Moscow, Kunstmuseum Bonn and MUSAC, as well as at international biennials and festivals, including the the Riga Biennale, the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the Short Film Festival Oberhausen and at Curtas Vila Do Conde. Cortiñas lives and works in Berlin.

Mason Leaver-Yap develops texts, exhibitions and events in collaboration with artists. Leaver-Yap most recently worked with Ingrid Pollard, Renée Green and Free Agent Media, Onyeka Igwe, Lin+Lam, Evan Ifekoya, Oreet Ashery, Laura Guy, Sunil Gupta and the Estate of Tessa Boffin, Sharon Hayes and Mathew Parkin, Lucy McKenzie, Iman Issa, Wendy Jacob, Alejandro Cesarco, Jimmy Robert, Rachel O’Reilly, Andrea Büttner, Alexis Mitchell and Sharlene Bamboat, Kat Anderson, Jamie Crewe and Beatrice Gibson. Leaver-Yap lives in Glasgow and Berlin.

Philip Widmann creates films, texts and film programmes. His films and videos have been shown at the Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, Views from the Avantgarde, Yamagata International Documentary FF, FID Marseille, CPH:DOX, Wexner Center for the Arts, KW Berlin and Videonale, Bonn. He has compiled film programmes for Arkipel Jakarta, Image Forum Tokyo, the Kassel Dokfest and others. In 2017 Widmann received the EMAF Media Art Prize of the German Film Critics (VDFK) for his work “Das Gestell”. He lives in Berlin.

Call for Entries

Our Call for Entries for EMAF 2021 is open until 31 December. Current works can be submitted in the Film, Installation and Expanded Media sections. Please find the submission platform here: https://submissions.emaf.de/

„Lichte Momente 2020 – Body Hacking“

“Lichte Momente” is a project of the Experimentalfilm Workshop e.V., which is also the supporting organisation of the EMAF. This year, for the 13th time, the outdoor video art exhibition will present works by international artists on the walls and facades of houses in Osnabrück’s historic centre. Under this year’s theme, “Body Hacking”, visitors will experience art that can otherwise only be seen in a museum - with works by Stine Deja, Eva Papamargariti, Filip Custic and Younghee Shin.

For more information please visit: https://www.lichtemomente-osnabrueck.de/

In memory of November 9th

The Cologne artist Gunter Demnig commemorates with the art project STOLPERSTEINE in Europe the victims of the NS era. A brass plaque is set into the sidewalk in front of their last self-chosen place of residence or work. In the meantime, “Stumbling Stones” have been laid in 1265 municipalities in Germany and in 21 European countries. In Osnabrueck, there are a total of 296 brass plaques on the sidewalks of the “City of Peace”.

Today, the anniversary of the 1938 Pogrom Night, “die Osnabrücker VIELEN” want to commemorate the victims of the NS regime with the action #stolpersteineputzenOS. The EMAF is part of “die Osnabrücker VIELEN” and has participated in the action.

“Die Osnabrücker VIELEN” are cultural creators and institutions from the city and district of Osnabrück who have declared themselves in favor of tolerance and artistic freedom and show solidarity with actors in the cultural scene who are attacked or questioned by right-wing populist and right-wing extremist positions.

Read more about DIE VIELEN (in German language)

@dievielen #stolpersteineputzenOS #9November #NieWieder #neveragain

In the coming week, three special films from this year’s program of the 33rd European Media Art Festival will be shown for the first time in Lower Saxony. Following the cancellation of the festival planned for April 2020 due to the pandemic, the EMAF is now presenting them in cooperation with the Independent FilmFest Osnabrück and the Kino im Sprengel in Hanover.

EMAF at the Independent FilmFest Osnabrück

At the invitation of the Independent FilmFest Osnabrück, which opens next Wednesday, two documentaries will be shown as part of an EMAF guest program: The Magic Mountain by Eitan Efrat and Daniel Mann (BE 2020, 68 min.) and What remains | Šta ostaje | What remains / Re-visited by Clarissa Thieme (DE/AT/BS 2020, 69 min.)

The Magic Mountain takes us to three places in Europe where quarries and caves allow us to look into the depths of the earth and the traces of our recent history. The film is an exploration of alternative forms of experiencing the world around us. (October 24, 17:30, Filmtheater Hasetor, Osnabrück, followed by a discussion with director Eitan Efrat)

What remains | Šta ostaje | What remains / Re-visited is a rapprochement with scenes of war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, which Thieme had already filmed ten years earlier. With an intervention that is as simple as it is cautious, she invites the local people to meet and remember. (October 25, 15.00, Filmtheater Hasetor, Osnabrück)

EMAF at Kino im Sprengel

In cooperation with the EMAF, the Kino im Sprengel in Hanover is showing the feature film debut of the Colombian Camilo Restrepo, Los Conductos (CO/BR/FR 2020, 74 min.), which won an award at this year’s Berlinale. The film tells the story of a young man in Medellín who, having just escaped a religious sect, is haunted again and again by the ghosts of the past. A deeply political cinematic trip. (October 24, 20.30, Kino im Sprengel, Hanover)

All filmmakers are long-standing guests of the EMAF and have helped shape the festival’s profile as an internationally renowned venue for young, experimental art. For this reason, we are particularly pleased to be able to bring their films to the cinema together with our cooperation partners, even under the current difficult conditions.

Details on ticket booking and the applicable Corona guidelines can be found on the websites of both organizers, www.filmfest-osnabrueck.de and www.kino-im-sprengel.de.

The Call for Entries for 34th European Media Art Festival is open

Deadline: 31 December 2020

Films, videos, installations and performance projects or expanded media works – we look forward to receiving your entries for European Media Art Festival No. 34!

The festival takes place from 21 to 25 April 2021. For five days, Osnabrück will become an international and trend-setting platform for media art and a meeting place for artists, curators, gallerists and students. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on view until 30 May 2021.

Our selection committee and curators will review the submissions in the coming months and develop the programme for the upcoming festival. The full programme will be available on our homepage www.emaf.de from mid-March 2021.

At the festival, two juries will select the winners of the “EMAF Media Art Award of German Filmcritics (VDFK)”, the “Dialogue Award” given by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the “EMAF Award” for a trend-setting work in Media Art.

We warmly invite you to submit your works!

Please use the online forms to submit all your entries by 31 December 2020 at the latest.

Please find further information and the submission documents at our website submissions.emaf.de.

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!

The EMAF juries distinguish three groundbreaking experimental films

The 34th European Media Art Festival (EMAF) have been announced: The EMAF Award for a groundbreaking work in media art goes to the British artist Emily Wardill for her experimental film “Night for Day”, which discusses the dialectic of utopian thinking as exemplified by a mother-son relationship in Portugal.

The Dialogue Award for the promotion of intercultural exchange goes to Ana Vaz, Vera Amaral and Mário Neto for their film “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, in which they explore the essence of cinema through their own observations.

“Michael Ironside and I” by German artist Marian Mayland wins the Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (VdFk). The essay film critically investigates film and television history via media images of masculinity in the 80s and 90s.

All award-winning films, as well as the entire film programme of the 34th EMAF, can be seen on the streaming platform www.emaf.cinemalovers.de up to and including 2 May.

The EMAF Award and the Dialogue Award are presented by a jury of media artists and curators, which this year includes Christina Li, Nour Ouayda and Claudia Slanar. The film critics Dunja Bialas, Tina Waldeck and Jan Künemund make up the jury for the EMAF Media Art Award of the VdFk.

The EMAF prize is awarded to “a poignant work that explores the power of cinema as a tool to time travel, and to create imaginary kinship across generations”. “Almost as a counterpoint to the precision afforded by current image technology, Wardill expertly employs light and shadow as a filmic device that points to the opaque and fractal nature of historic narratives as well as present realities.”

The EMAF Awards jury extends an honourable mention to “Happy Valley” by Chinese-American director Simon Liu: „A collage of surreal and material observations of the city, set against a soundscape of 80s Hong Kong pop songs and soap operas, it evokes a deep sense of longing for a common experience, and is a celebration of a survival instinct that is fundamentally human and universal”.

The Dialogue Award for “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Ana Vaz, Vera Amaral and Mário Neto distinguishes “…a remarkable exercise in unschooling founded upon intergenerational rapport and curiosity, where they jointly explore ways of seeing beyond sight. By doing so, filmmaking becomes a performative and sensory practice that involves the entire body. The film’s evocative soundscape and use of multi-vocality adds to the layered texture of the film that is underpinned by the present discourses of care and generosity, as we witness these young filmmakers investigate the relations between the visible and invisible, the sensible and insensible facts that will constitute how they view the world”, thus the jury.

The experimental film “Letter From Your Far-Off Country” by Indian-American filmmaker Suneil Sanzgiri receives an honourable mention from the Dialogue Award jury. The work evokes “the power of communication through letters that connects the protagonists of emancipatory struggles in India through almost half a century. In ‘Letter From Your Far-Off Country’ Suneil Sanzgiri explores how historic events can be turned into performative gestures which then inform present and future tactics in fighting oppression and censorship. He follows the images and sounds of revolutionary moments by bringing different sources such as analogue video, 16mm footage and digital renderings together thereby not only destabilizing a linear historic narration but also blurring the boundaries of experimentation in cinema”.

With “Michael Ironside and I” by Marian Mayland, the EMAF Media Art Awards Jury of the Association of German Film Critics distinguishes “a complex essayistic examination of film and television history. In the flowing montage of found genre images, traces of toxic masculinity become visible that do not permit nostalgic transfiguration. Nonetheless, the author’s cinephile sensitivity remains the fuel of (self-)reflection”.

The full-length jury statements as a video are available at: https://emaf.cinemalovers.de/en/navigation/awards

Written information can be found at: https://www.emaf.de/en/timetable/

All award winners can be seen until 2 May at: https://emaf.cinemalovers.de/en/navigation/film

We offer our sincere thanks to our sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

Best regards from the EMAF team 2021

presse@emaf.de

In this year’s hybrid version of the European Media Art Festival (EMAF), the Talks and Campus sections feature a series of media art discussions on the festival’s focus “Possessed”, as well as a selection of current works in which specialised media art groups from European art academies present their perspectives. You can engage with the programmes for the most part on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, but they will also be shown in the windows of exhibition venues in Osnabrück’s old town, depending on current Corona pandemic regulations.

The Talks at this year’s European Media Art Festival (EMAF) address the question of what “ownership” and “possession” mean in today’s world and investigate their potential interrelationships. “The speakers will discuss issues of ownership and control in the context of land, identity and information,” explains curator Daphne Dragona, who is responsible for the talks programme. “In the process, they also address the power of belief systems, customs and dominant narratives. At the centre of the programme is the connection between today’s forms of extractivism and exploitation - whether of mineral resources, human labour or data - and the colonialism of the settlers, racialised capitalism”.

In six virtual discussion rounds, the participating theorists, artists and activists will discuss, among other things, the similarities between economies based on the burning of fossil fuels and colonial plantations, technoheritage and cultural dispossession, today’s hidden workforce and slavery, digital habits and collective trauma. Special emphasis is placed on the incessant struggle of resistant networks and ecologies. Artists Nora Al-Badri and Lerato Shadi, among others, discuss strategies for countering cultural dispossession.

Regine Rapp and Heather Davis take up the role of plastic in our lives today. The binaries of human/machine and race/subjugation are central to the discussion by Dr Ramon Amaro and Maya Indira Ganesh. Ariana Dongus and Tiara Roxanne examine data colonialism. Black ecology and the connections between climate change and colonialism are the topics in the talk by Jacqueline Brown and Sria Chatterjee. And Liam Young joins us on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city made up of the earth’s entire population.

“By reflecting on ancestral and contemporary technologies and cultural practices, the EMAF 2021 Talks programme underscores the continuing need for a differentiated perception of the world that will enable us to inhabit this planet in a different way,” says curator Daphne Dragona.

The entire EMAF Talks programme is available at www.emaf.de.

The festival section EMAF Campus is once again offering a platform to classes and specialist groups from European academies and universities in this festival year. Due to Corona, these will feature for the most part on the streaming platform emaf.cinemalovers.de, but also on-site in Osnabrück in the windows of the hase 29 art space, in the windows of the Institut für Kunst|Kunstpädagogik /Institute for Art/Art Education in the Seminarstraße and in the window of the bbk art quarter.

The classes of Julika Rudelius from the Hochschule für Kunst Bremen and Candice Breitz & Eli Cortiñas from the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Braunschweig will present installations, performances and videos, while the class of Katarina Zdjelar from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam will be represented with a video programme. The Institut für Kunst|Kunstpädagogik /Institute for Art|Art Education at the University of Osnabrück will also feature videos from the modules of Bettina Bruder and Barbara Kaesbohrer, and the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences will present apps and videos from the Media & Interaction Design course, supervised by Christoph Mett, Hannes Nehls, Björn Plutka and Michaela Ramm.

We offer our sincere thanks to our sponsors, in particular nordmedia, the City of Osnabrück, the Goethe-Institut, the German Foreign Office, the Stiftung Niedersachsen, the VGH-Stiftung, and the Landschaftsverband Osnabrücker Land e. V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Programme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theme curators:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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