Competition programme №5

Online players describe their struggles with «swatting», a life-threatening cyber-harassment phenomenon that looms over them whenever they play. The events take shape through youtube videos and wireframe images from a video game.

Sara Cwynar's Red Film, 2018, continues the artist's meditations on the intersection of identity and capitalism. Cwynar quotes writers and philosophers as she pulls focus on the color-coding of the mass production of consumer goods, including cosmetics, shoes, and the red muscle car. Red Film critiques capital's persuasive, constant stream of pressure on women to conform and consume, questioning the effects of this torrent on the self, while pointing to the use of «high art» to sell aspirational merchandise, as distilled in a «Cézanne»-branded jewelry box. The film's rich layering of vertiginous content - including multiple voices reading a range of quotations; the artist, upside down, self-reflexively addressing the camera; and a group of women in red performing choreographed gestures — produces a sense of estrangement, where a concrete, autonomous self is fragmented and destabilized.

«Lithic Choreographies» is an experimental documentary shot on the Swedish island of Gotland. It mines historical data, mingling it with speculative fictions, to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island's geological strata. Working with locals to ground the film's investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages. Scanning the landscape characterised by palaeo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts. The film culminates in a choreographed co-habitation of a disused quarry by a human dancer and a rock.

Hypnotising audio tracks dance to the soundtrack of Canapa's previous film «JÉRÔME NOETINGER» (2018), for which Canapa filmed a solo performance by the French sound artist. As a member of the renowned Cellule d'intervention Metamkine, Noetinger manipulates magnetic tape creating bewitching sounds, now enriched with stroboscopic effects. Cinema for your ears!

Googoosh, a popular and loved iranian-azerbaijani singer, performs a version of the song «Ayrılıq» – Separation. The performance is from 1970s television show and it has been copied several times from one videotape to another. «Ayrılıq» could be a love song but it is told that composer Ali Salimi, who had migrated from Soviet Azerbaijan to Iran and left behind his home and loved ones, wanted to make music about his sense of longing.