An Incomplete Assembly

Long established as a key fixture in the festival landscape, this April sees EMAF once again become a meeting point for the international media art scene. In its programme the festival addresses developments and discourses—whether artistic, technological or political—that directly affect how we live together in society. With this year’s thematic focus An Incomplete Assembly, we want to shine a light on the role and responsibilities of (art) institutions: In a climate of rising attacks on artistic freedom and freedom of speech, what spaces for free expression can and must they provide? In which areas do they hinder exchange and encounter? What benefits do they offer, to whom, and at whose expense? How can their resources be redirected to bring about positive change?

The exhibition An Incomplete Assembly, curated by Inga Seidler, grasps assembly as a dynamic construction of inclusion and exclusion. Institutions do not appear as static systems but rather as performative ordering principles which—according to a combination of spatial arrangements, media framings and temporal regimes—organise the public realm and shape belonging. Included are installations by Yalda Afsah, Alternative Monument collective, Bianca Baldi, Bethan Hughes, Robin Kötzle and Sarah Reva Mohr.

they gave us flames, we made a fire, a film and performance programme curated by artist Ana Vaz, seeks to expand our understanding of film as a closed work. It examines practices that regard their creative processes not as a means to an end, but as an integral part of the works themselves, bringing together works that pose questions about the agency of their creators, participants and users. With contributions by María Barea & Warmi Cine y Video, Amanda Devulsky, Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski, Myriam Lefkowitz and Yugantar.

Raquel Schefer and Philip Widmann’s series What Is Needed explores the Mostra Internacional de Cinema de Intervenção, a festival that took place in post-revolutionary Portugal in 1976, which attempted to connect different liberation and emancipation movements as well as films from the Global North and South. The curators will be inconversation with Stefanie Baumann, Ana Algarra Navarro and Cecilia Valenti about films by Ateyyat Al-Abnoudi and Cinequipa.

The Talks & Workshops, curated by Franziska Pierwoss ask what productive responses to censorship, institutional cowardice and collective fatigue might look like. Highlighting practices that intervene directly, the programme invites audiences to organise within—and bend—existing frameworks. It comprises performances, conversations and workshops by and with Alternative Monument collective, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Isidora Ilić & guests and Alicja Rogalska.

Artist in focus
This year’s Artist in Focus programme is dedicated to Marwa Arsanios. At its centre is her ongoing film series Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, in which she accompanies feminist collectives and initiatives in Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria, Lebanon and Colombia who fight for their rights to land and self-determination, and the transmission of knowledge. Further contributions are by Ali Al-Adawi, Simone Bitton, Haytham El-Wardany, Mohamad Malas and Reem Shilleh.

International selection and feature films
The films in these sections employ subversive energy and defiant humour to take a stand against prescribed silence and political impotence. They bring forgotten images and words back into circulation, countering the infrastructures that underpin the seeming normality of our present moment. Included are recent films by Kamal Aljafari, Basma Al-Sharif, Stephanie Barber, Meriem Bennani & Orian Barki, Magdalena Bermudez, Sofia Gallisá Muriente, Onyeka Igwe, Daniel Jacoby, Taufiqurrahman Kifu & Hattie Wade, Vika Kirchenbauer, Martin Moolhuijsen, Zuqiang Peng, Alee Peoples, Nicolás Pereda, Adam Piron, Marta Popivoda, Steve Reinke, Tulapop Saenjaroen, Viktoria Schmid, Mike Stoltz, Elisabeth Subrin, Maryam Tafakory, and others.

Unburdened recollections
For this edition, initiators Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy have invited curatorial duo Mark Toscano and Zena Grey to show groundbreaking experimental films and videos from the 1960s and 70s, featuring works by Jordan Belson, Allan Kaprow, Yayoi Kusama & Jud Yalkut, Pat O’Neill, Lillian Schwartz & Ken Knowlton, Single Wing Turquoise Bird, James Whitney and others.