News 23 Februar 2021
The 34th European Media Art Festival will begin in Osnabrück in a few weeks. However, we cannot currently guarantee under which conditions a visit in person to the festival will be possible under the Corona guidelines in force at the end of April. We are therefore also preparing online formats that will enable a virtual visit. At the same time, of course, we are planning for the visit as usual - this also applies to this year's EMAF exhibition in the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, which is entitled "possesed" and curated by Berlin curator Inga Seidler.
In keeping with the double meaning of the word "possessed" in its German translation - the EMAF exhibition moves in the field of tension between the concepts of possession and obsession. The works on display address colonial and capitalist contexts of domination, control, ownership and property in a variety of ways. Particular attention is paid to the role of technologies. At the same time, the media art works counter them with new, alternative and indigenous visions of interaction and ownership.
One highlight among others is the altar-like video installation "Madre Drone" by the Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez: It fuses myths, symbols and rituals with images of extraction and indigenous land rights, cultural appropriation and the destruction of nature through industrialisation. Nora Al Badri's work, entitled "Babylonian Vision", interrogates contemporary museum practices by using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to generate synthetic Babylonian objects based on antiquities. What it means to have no history and thus no future culminates in the video "Motlhaba Wa Re KeNamile", which Lerato Shadi shot in her hometown Lotlhakane (Botswana): The work is reminiscent of the so-called slave masks that white slave owners put over the heads of their dehumanised workers. Pedro Neves Marquez examines histories of colonisation through the lens of biotechnology, pointing out how closely the colonisation of peoples is linked to the colonisation of land and to control over biological reproduction as a whole. With his large-scale map of new extractivism Vladan Joler explores and visualises a range of technical and social aspects of contemporary phenomena at the intersection of technology and society. One of the theses that artist Johannes Paul Raether works with in the guise of "Protektorama, the World Healing Witch”, is that humanity, obsessed with the principles of capital, is mutating into a prosthetic of its own digital devices.
We warmly invite you to join us at the EMAF 2021, whether online or on site!
Up-to-date information on this will be published on our website.
