Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025 took place at Osservatorio Prada, Milan between 23 November 2023 and 29 January 2024. The venue proved curiously appropriate for the exhibition conceived by artists and researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, engaging with a project about imperialism, control, time, politics, and technology in an intriguing, […]
The exhibition Liquid Spaces: Politics of the Screen, curated by Doreen A. Ríos for the Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial (BUAM) in Ecuador, delves into the dynamic nature of environments shaped by digital technologies. Underscoring the complexities of screen interfaces and their societal implications, Ríos explores the concept of ‘liquid spaces’, where boundaries blur and definitions remain elusive, reflecting perpetual change. Set within the Latin American context, the artworks address themes such as extractivism, surveillance, and technocapitalism. The exhibition features a diverse range of artworks, including painting and virtual reality, through which the relationship between the body and the screen is discussed, while highlighting audience engagement and interaction as integral components of the viewing experience. Drawing from her previous curatorial endeavors, in an interview with Annet Dekker, Ríos reflects on the transformative influence of screens on perceptions and realities, suggesting that screens serve as modern oracles and their users as potential shamans navigating the digital landscape.
Dutch artist Nemo Vos discusses his approach to VR and his vision of the role played by film festivals in making VR available. Reflecting on the premiere of his work 8 Billion Selves at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024, Vos addresses both the challenges and advantages of exhibiting VR at festivals. Looking to the future, Vos outlines his vision for a series of co-created VR works, each featuring a different artist and aiming for distribution in theatres to achieve economic sustainability for the medium. The artist emphasises the responsibility VR artists themselves have in creating awareness and cultivating audiences, and details how he uses co-creation and collaboration with other art forms to elevate VR from a niche technology to a mainstream artistic form.
It is rare that an exhibition of contemporary visual art is so vigorously conceived as a reading exercise.[1] In Dora García’s She Has Many Names (M HKA Antwerp), curated by Joanna Zielińska, books are everywhere. Not only are writers such as James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, or Albert Camus subjects of García’s work, but writing and […]
Lives nowadays are saturated with online clicks, daily newsletters, social media updates, and a 24-hour cycle of news streams. The online world is vast and the wheels never stop turning. So how do you adopt the internet as a medium to a curatorial purpose? This is one of the questions curators Arianna Mercado and Yuji […]
The thematic contents of the Berlin Biennale 12 and documenta 15, which both took place in Summer 2022, are certainly close, ‘focusing on themes of colonialism and decolonization … art as an opportunity to repair’[1] even though ‘documenta fifteen is practice and not theme based’,[2] its themes also follow decolonisation and demonstrating the continued presence […]
Queerkins: Ark is the second chapter of a four-chapter cinematic virtual reality experience Queerskins (2018-ongoing). The piece, made by Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski in collaboration with the choreographer Brandon Powers, premiered at the Venice VR Expanded exhibition of the Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica La Biennale di Venezia that took place digitally – in virtual […]
In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton remarks that ecology isn’t just about global warming, recycling and solar power – and also not just to do with everyday relationships between humans and non-humans. It has to do with love, loss, despair, and compassion. (…) It has to do with capitalism and with what might exist after […]
The Media City Film Festival, an international festival for film and video art, is moving online with a new exhibition space: In the “Dark Dark Gallery”, filmmakers, curators and artists explore the connections between concepts and themes and the history of experimental cinema and contemporary moving image art. The inaugural show ‘Radical Acts of Care’, […]
The xapiri are the images of the yarori ancestors who turned into animals in the beginning of time. This is their real name. You call them ‘spirits’, [sic] but they are other. They came into existence when the forest was still young. The shaman elders have always made them dance and we continue to do […]
On 12 January 2020 the exhibition Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities opened in the Palazzo del Governatore in Parma. Commissioned by the city’s Department of Culture led by the film studies scholar Michele Guerra and conceived as part of the cultural program for Parma 2020 Italian Capital of Culture, this exhibition offers a transmedial and media-archaeological […]
The Eye Film Museum Amsterdam has announced the new date for the previously postponed solo exhibition of work by Chantal Akerman: ‘Chantal Akerman: Passages’, organized in collaboration with the Chantal Akerman Foundation & Marian Goodman Gallery Paris, London, New York, will be open from 1 June – 30 August 2020. The exhibition features eight of […]
One must imagine Béla Tarr busy. Even though he has repeatedly insisted on the fact that he considers himself retired – at least as a director of feature films[1] – he has not stopped working since the release of The Turin Horse (2011). Currently, he is preparing a book project;[2] between 2013 and 2017 he […]
This year’s gay pride celebrations were particularly important as both community-based groups and official institutions organised various symposiums, exhibitions, and festivals to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots – an event often credited as the birth of the gay political movement. In Europe, several municipalities and official institutions capitalised on this anniversary and […]
Upon entering the exhibition Blackout in Rotterdam’s Kunsthal it took a few moments to adjust one’s eyes to the darkness. Rather than a typical white cube of a museum or gallery space, the exhibition instead filled a cavernous space marked predominantly by black walls and low light. Within the darkness, in the space’s various enclaves, […]
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.
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