Nasenrücken

Video art screening

The artist describes the origins of the film as follows: “Jonas Mekas is to blame for this film. We were sitting in a bar in St. Petersburg when he pulled a camera out of his bag and started filming everyone at the table. In his hands I recognized the twin sister of my old Sony, which had long been lying unused because it shot on outdated and unfashionable DV tapes. I took my Sony out of the drawer and carried it with me everywhere for several years, filming random fragments in the hope that they would eventually speak to each other and come together as something like a film. That is more or less how it turned out.”

The Plant Messenger is a project by artist Anastasia Kaineanung. At its center is the figure of the “Messenger,” a notion drawn from the philosophy of the Russian avant-garde literary group known as the Chinari (including Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and others). The Messenger is surrounded by the world of Plants — the “neighboring world,” in the group’s terminology. He approaches them with questions. But do the Plants hear him?

Alanna Dongowski is a visual artist currently studying Painting at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. She describes the film as follows: “Aunt Ingeborg’s clay animals stand alone in the garden, shivering. Painted letters tell their story.”

Daša Geiger is an audio-visual artist and photographer based in the Ruhr area. Her essay film explores the tensions experienced by those living in places where the language is not their mother tongue. Told through a poetic visual narrative, the film moves through these in-between spaces: moments of disorientation, small triumphs of understanding, and the feeling of being both present and excluded at the same time.

Driton Hajredini, an Albanian artist and filmmaker, asks a priest in Germany whether it is a sin to be born Albanian in Kosovo. What may at first sound like a naïve question ultimately raises profound issues of injustice and the borders imposed by states on artists. The video was also presented as part of MANIFESTA 14 in Prishtina in 2022.

Eluned Zoe Aiano is a filmmaker, editor, and translator with a background in Visual Anthropology, whose work largely focuses on Central and Eastern Europe. Imam pesmu da vam pevam / I Have a Song to Sing You weaves together ethnographic archive materials from her days as a prophet with contemporary footage created after the supernatural forces had departed. This experimental short plays with dualities of time and ontology, exploring how such an experience reshaped her relationship to the surrounding landscape.

Gökçen Dilek Acay is a visual and performance artist and musician from Istanbul. In her work ICHUNDICHS, she explores the idea of the multiplied self. At its core, the piece is a performative reflection on identity, embodiment, and representation. Missing the theatrical quality of constructing and performing another version of herself, she created a digital double. Using AI, she trained a model to generate AI Dilek — a version that looks like her, speaks like her, but is not her.

Shon Kim is a New York–based visual artist and filmmaker. BOOKANIMA—a compound of “Book” and “Anima”—is an experimental animation project that gives books a new cinematic life. It seeks to create a form of “Book Cinema” situated between literature and film, using chronophotographic animation in homage to Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. In this work, BOOKANIMA experiments with dance through the flow of styles: from ballet and Korean dance to modern dance, jazz, aerial silk, tap, aerobics, disco, breakdance, hip hop, and social dance.