Competition programme №2

Shed A Light shows us a space where nature is purported to have taken over from humanity. Inspired by global warming, the filmed environment invites us to explore and celebrate ambiguity by being at once intimate and expansive. The video is an ode to diagonal lines, the transcending of limits and the joy of slipping over a fence to discover a wasteland. Or, a now-abandoned but marvelous garden, in which the artist has discovered a forgotten dystopic biological laboratory.

«Fables» is a single surreal animation reflecting the cornerstones of Wong Ping's practice, which combines the crass and the colourful to mount a critically humorous discourse around repressed sexuality, personal sentiments and political limitations. 'Fables', in particular, comprises three back-to-back distinct animations, each of which presents, as the title suggests, a succinct fictional story with imaginary characters that communicates a 'moral' lesson. Jumping between the tales of a Buddhist nun elephant, social-media-addicted chicken and insect-phobic tree, 'Fables' touch upon issues of appearance, love, digital interaction, narcissism and fear.

«L´Étoile de Mer» by Maya Schweizer is an experimental navigation in the Mediterranean Sea, mingling underwater shots, silent movies, author's own video archive and underwater shots, faded-in texts and a sound collage. This image and sound essay is about forgetting and the sea as a point of reference and reflection. The sea is a flowing immaterial space and thus seems conducive to forgetting.

«Experiments in perception are being conducted in a wonderland of damaged images. Rainer Kohlberger conceived his work as a post-apocalyptic science fiction film, its story unfolding after the sixth great mass extinction has succeeded in wiping out the human race. A civilization of replicants bioengineered by Homo sapiens before they died out is now taking over the otherwise uninhabitable earth. The basis of this work is constituted by flashing phantom images and ghostly digital scenes in which water surfaces and natural sites are vaguely discernable as shadowy figures appear and disappear. Kindred to cinema, the ghosts in the machine make their perpetual rounds and serve as a distant reminder of the vanished human beings». - Stefan Grissemann

«What Remains» is constructed from images that sag shot and gathered during 2015 and 2016 in Cizre, a primarily Kurdish town in Turkey on the Syrian border, as well as found footage from all over Turkey from the same period. A focus of the work is the artist's footage of collective Kurdish mourning practices, and looking at how images of the dead are used in these practices.
«This video is an attempt at 'giving the images back to the ones who gave them to us', it aims to 'allow the ghosts to come back', and revisit the images, re-think the recent history» - Belit Sağ