❗ Trigger/content warning: blood, death, animal cruelty, violence, murder
Emerging Artists – Contemporary Experimental Films and Video Art from Germany Vol. 7 The current edition comprises six works by artists approaching their subjects in an experimental, performative, and essayist way. Their works elude a distinctive conceptual classification: Parasitically, they use new technological developments and comments from social media to mantle and contextualise them again; they explore the artificiality of digital, floral, and animal bodies; they outline the spiritual reworking of an ecologic disaster and question conventional gender attribution.
What unites these artists is their willingness to investigate borderlands – they embark on a search for new forms, an autonomous visual world, or alternative narrative structures. Their works playfully meander on an alleged threshold between the disciplines – an approach which, in quite many academic institutions, is taught in strict separation. And yet, an open exchange of knowledge between the institutions could stimulate valuable ideas. Art academies would benefit from a stronger integration of acting, dramaturgy and technical implementation.
TWO GIANTS THAT EXIST HERE - A GERMAN FAIRYTALE
Director: Gianna Scholten
Country: Germany
Duration: 21
TWO GIANTS THAT EXIST HERE - A GERMAN FAIRYTALE confronts us with the rightwing spiritual movement in Germany, which gained a strong following during the Corona pandemic. In symbolic encounters, such as a train ride passing by the Lorelei and underscored with Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", original audio recordings from the rightwing extremist conspiracy scene are juxtaposed with the visual aesthetics of German fairy tales.
SPEAKING FLOWERS
Director: Conrad Veit, Charlotte Maria Kätzl
Country: Germany
Duration: 19
Is this the swan song to the beauty of nature, when flowers ask themselves "Am I the only one still alive?". Speaking Flowers is a Super 8 film ironically overloaded with flowers and fairy tale film motifs, in which the only seemingly humanoid being is a flower that guides us through the events and yet leaves us in a void of floral profusion.
TECHNICALLY_BREATHING
Director: Markéta Müllerová
Country: Germany
Duration: 6
"technically_breathing" is a 3D animated film that raises the question of whether avatars and artificial intelligence truly breathe or merely create an illusion. The film explores the idea that breathing in times of societal crises can be understood as an act of survival and resistance.
THE CURRENCY – SENSING 1 AGBOGBLOSHIE
Director: Gregor Kasper, Elom 20ce, Musquiqui Chihying
Country: Germany
Duration: 16
An experimental poetic investigation of one of the world's largest e-waste recycling sites, Agbogbloshie, as a contact zone of complex global economic, social, power politics, and technological processes.
MAN UP
Director: Vera Kayh, Leve Kühl, Marie Scholjegerdes
Country: Germany
Duration: 5
The 20-year-old El embarks on a search for his understanding of masculinity, for which he deals with his relationship with his father and struggles to find his new manhood.
HELA ET AL.
Director: Tess Marschner
Country: Germany / Spain
Duration: 13
The video essay HELA ET AL. is a reflection on reproductive bodies and reproduction technology in techno- sciences: Henrietta Lacks' eternal cell line, the cloned sheep Dolly, artificial wombs, eggs and mice appear both as scientific products as well as actors that confuse the concept of the human.