04/25/2024
EMAF 37 - Opening
We are pleased that the starting signal for five days of the European Media Art Festival was given yesterday evening in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück. Around 1,000 people were there when Anna Jehle & Juliane Schickedanz (Head of the Kunsthalle Osnabrück), Wolfgang Beckermann (First City Councilor, City of Osnabrück), Dr. Jörg Mielke (Head of Lower Saxony State Chancellery) and Alfred Rotert & Katrin Mundt (head of EMAF) opened the festival in fairly cool temperatures.
“As international and diverse in terms of artistic approach as the selected works are, the curators of the exhibition and the film programs are just as international and diverse. And so these diverse approaches and perspectives are reflected in the 5-day program of the festival, the exhibition, the almost 100 films, the numerous performances and contributions,” said Wolfgang Beckermann, the first city councilor of the city of Osnabrück, yesterday evening said at the opening of the 37th European Media Art Festival in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.
Accordingly, we now continue with four days of a full programme. Here we have put together some tips for you:
As part of the Sudden Flash themematic programme, we will be showing the film Memoria tomorrow (Friday) at 8:30 p.m. in the Hasetor film theater. It deals with a Scottish orchid grower, Jessica (Tilda Swinton), spends time in Bogotá with her sister and her sister’s family. An unexplained and unevidenced bang wakes her, and she tries to track it down: to recreate it, to share it with someone, to find out what it is. Swaths of indefinite stillness begin to tingle: at any moment they might be cut through by an image or a sound that seems to have no origin and, to most, no impact—a catastrophe without precedent, or consequence. Impact registers on Jessica’s face: a gasp in public, or a look of wonder, or tears. Origins are buried, occluded, built on top of, but Jessica finds herself attuned to them. A hole is found in a skull: to let something out, or let something in.
The panel How to Resist as an Artist? on Saturday at 3 p.m. in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will address the background of the “Strike Germany” movement. Jury member Marwa Arsanios, the artist Caitlin Berrigan and the cultural theorist and philosopher Sami Khatib discuss with moderator Franziska Pierwoss about the impact of the resistance of cultural workers against the discrimination of filmmakers from No Other Land by politics and the media during and after the Berlinale can unfold. How do cultural workers deal with cancellations, scandal and repression? How do they maintain space for contradiction and disagreement without excluding individual voices from institutional contexts? The panel is intended to give guest speakers and the audience space to share their thoughts, experiences and strategies.
Also on Saturday, at 7 p.m., three prizes will be awarded in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück: the EMAF Award (worth 3,000 euros), the Dialog Award (worth 2,000 euros) and the EMAF Media Art Award of the Association of German Film Critics (worth 2,000 euros). The award ceremony will be followed at 8:30 p.m. by the live music set COOL FOR YOU.
On Sunday at 2 p.m. the performance voice under – sensory assembly can be seen in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, followed by a group discussion led by Ester M. Bergsmark and Anna Zett.
The performative film screening voice under is an invitation to bring your body to the cinema: to listen with your eyes, to see with your back, to respond to the screen with the felt sense of your own experience. Here, filmmaker Ester M. Bergsmark will present a shorter version of this transdisciplinary work, which consists of three parts: film screening, board game and meditation. Focusing on the spine and our peripheral nervous system, the performance puts into question our frontal cerebral sense of orientation, creating space for positive uncertainty and porous narratives about queer deep time, threat, dissociation, and reconnection.
30 people can take part in the performance – please register in time at presse@emaf.de.
We wish all guests and friends of the festival a good time and interesting insights at the 37th European Media Art Festival!!
Many greetings from the EMAF 2024 team!
CONCEPT AND FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT Katrin Mundt, Alfred Rotert www.emaf.de
Supporters of EMAF 2024