Subject of the 33rd EMAF: FIRST PERSON PLURAL
The submission deadline for the 33rd European Media Art Festival ended a few days ago. We are pleased to announce the theme of this year's festival today. It reads: FIRST PERSON PLURAL.
In contemporary media art, the "I" plays a prominent role: artists share their experiences, question their identity, address their relationship to the operating system of art, or explore individual and collective gestures of resistance and forms of self-organisation. At the same time, the viewers are also increasingly addressed as "I", are challenged to "immersively" expand the boundaries of their own body and consciousness or to experience their own perspective and physicality in relation to art. In the process, the "I" is once again at stake, as the technological penetration of the body renders its boundaries increasingly porous.
In its exhibition, thematic film programme and talks, EMAF looks at how ideas about the “I” are changing under the influence of digital media and the socioeconomic conditions of late modernity and asks: Who or what has the agency to say "I" and be perceived as such? How much "we" does the "I" contain? And how much "I" can "we" still allow ourselves today?
Within these questions, the individual programme sections gather and discuss artistic works and contributions that playfully circle around the narratives of the “I”, reinterpret them from an emancipatory-resistant perspective, and interrogate their activating role, from which forms of collectivity can emerge. Framed by the festival theme FIRST PERSON PLURAL and the questions it raises, the exhibition, thematic film programme and talks approach these works from various angles, methods and foci, while drawing shared connections between the programme sections.
The Exhibition gathers works investigating ideas of the self, its bodily constitution and increasing fragmentation (enabled by digital technologies), while also considering the relationship between the individual and the collective and the ways in which it engages with others and the external environment. Creating a space/environment for live presentations, and direct encounters, the exhibition focuses on different ways of engaging with artistic works beyond the presentation of static installations.
The thematic Film Programme focuses on the many ways artists and filmmakers have explored subjectivity, collectivity and anonymity through the visual devices of faces and masks. Is the outsized face that confronts us on the cinema screen a type of mask in itself? And instead of simply concealing one’s face, could a mask accentuate feelings and impulses not transmittable through a human countenance? Through a series of short and feature length films and moving image works, the programme will establish and break conventions of cinematic identification and representation in unexpected ways.
The Talks aim to move away from the conventional configuration of one-directional traffic from speaker to audience, and to explore discursive and performative formats that invite interaction or even co-dependency between all those present. By activating the exhibition and film programmes as resources for collective study, it explores practices of plurivocal artistic-discursive exchange, interference and cohabitation, thereby privileging the negotiation of difference over the formation of consensus.
Presenting a multitude of artistic and discursive contributions, EMAF 2020 reflects the "I" as a finite resource. For the "I" alone is exhausted – in the sense that it requires expansion by others, always referring to a multiple of itself or a "we". Artistic works are shown, discussed and studied that take a new, critical look at the use of this resource and make its multiple and collective dimensions visible.
We cordially invite you to join us in the coming months and report on the 33rd European Media Art Festival.
With best regards from the whole festival team
Katharina Lohmeyer
presse@emaf.de
CONCEPT AND FESTIVAL MANAGEMENT
Katrin Mundt, Hermann Noering, Alfred Rotert
GUEST CURATORS: Inga Seidler (Exhibition), Isabel de Sena (Talks), Herb Shellenberger (Film Programme)
