Landing in Osnabrueck can be a culture "shock" for North Americans. A pretty medieval town in the middle of Germany, sadly bombed and sadly reconstructed, it proudly hosts the European Media Arts Festival -- a great example of what I love about the German arts scene:
Despite international perception, Berlin is not the be all and end all. The centres of art production, academic research, and presentation are thoroughly decentralised, with not-always-perfect but gutsy places like Oberhausen or Hof sporting major international events and meeting points. Thus for 5 days, you see Asian and European guest artists navigating their way from the alternative backyard theatre to the "Warehouse" along the old fortified town wall of Osnabrueck in amazement or puzzlement or both.
EMAF is as old as Toronto's Images Festival (26), born out of a time when video was already an established art form but going into technological overdrive with the arrival of the internet.
DEceleration in an accelerating media age was one of this year's points of discussion,
mainly realized in the
festival's film program Mapping Perception and partly the extensive (and very kinetic) exhibition Mapping Time. One could argue that the deceleration thread went against the grain, but then why not. Mapping was another elegantly chosen connector, in a literal video matrix sense as well as a sounding out of positions. It didn't always work in practice, but one has to be grateful to any festival programmer who tries to make sense of 3000+ international submissions and not just randomly fills time slots.
Similarly, every one-hour film program --curated by a team under the seasoned direction of Ralf Sausmikat, who decelerated on his bike, cigarette in hand-- had a heading or theme, from "Echoing Walls" to "The Forsaken". It worked so well when everything fell into place. Like in the "Continental Drift" program where 16mm --Toronto's Chris Kennedy opening with ONE ROLL IN THE BLACKNESS-- met a gaming & animation aesthetic, experimental video met funny stories. And it could go so wrong as in the "Activated Landscapes" program where formal and content indifference met boredom met pathos in four out of five pieces. The obvious landscape theme remained literally on the surface (opening, it has to be said, with the aggravating THE WAVE, a voyeuristic and insultingly unsubtle and dull look at the recent excavation of Francoist victims in Spain).
Part of the deceleration effect in Osnabrueck was the relaxed festival atmosphere. None of the TIFF head-set countdown machinery here: programs might start 10 minutes late, Q&A moderators get lost in the tiny roundabout town (very easy to do, it turns out), making for a European festival vibe of heady and, in good German tradition, political curation and a laid back flow you simply had to embrace. I did that by taking the time to see a delicious
retrospective on constructivist films (Mapping Material), from its heavily German Eggeling-Rutmann-Richter beginnings to the mainly American post-war phase to its global and noticeably less German digital present. A solid survey I wish we could show in Canada.
Another reason for the unique vibe:
EMAF might be the youngest festival I have been to, with a huge under-30 high school and art academy student crowd, both as participants and audiences. When I ask Hermann Noering, another third of the festival AD triumvirate, about this, he describes the festival's ongoing efforts to give room to student work and to actively integrate the regional and national art students in all programs, shows, workshops and meetings. Ralf Sausmikat told me he decided to give 8 film programs over to student curators -- not always to his own satisfaction, he admits, with more narrative, more pop, more documentary than he would choose. But that courage to relinquish power to the next generation, one with vastly different viewing habits than someone socialized with 1970s experimental work, to engage and fight with them about their decisions and then show them, is to EMAF's credit. Being at the periphery geographically, the festival seems intentionally not geared towards big bang outcome/most premieres/hyper-busy marketplace but leaves room for improvisation and chance (as I bump into artist-curator-professor Michael Brynntrup, former Images juror and hopefully back in Toronto soon, as well as CanArtist
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay at the four video-on-demand stations in the cozy Gallery Cafe).
The word "European" in the festival's name is a relic from the early days, long outlived, this year with an interesting program on
New Chinese Media Art in collaboration with the 3rd N Minutes Video Art Festival Shanghai, activist-filmmaker Hala Galal reporting on The Role of Media in Egypt and a respectable 12 Canadian artists among others. At the end of the five days,
my favourites included one Japanese and two German filmmakers: Kei Shichiri's pitch-perfect 35mm visual sound symphony EXPERIENCE IN MATERIAL NO. 52 DUBHOUSE, a poetic constructivist masterpiece on architecture, light & darkness and the recent tsunami.
Berliner Omer Fast's 40-minute disconcerting narrative documenta13 film CONTINUITY, a war commentary which I would love to see in dialogue with Harun Farocki's "Images of War (at a Distance)". Tied with
Nina Koennemann's BANN, a brilliantly shot multi-perspective examination of a near-extinct species: the smoker who huddles in the corners of office buildings. As in previous works, she proves to be an urban sociologist in the public space, a documentarist and subtle commentator who approaches her subjects with open curiosity and humour.
Nina Koennemann will be our next InterMedia Artist in Residence in Toronto this fall, so you will have a chance to see her work and meet her at our Culture talks @ Goethe. (Our previous Resident Daniel Koetter was also at hand at EMAF). Koennemann, trained at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, has exhibited at Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Portikus Frankfurt, Camden Art Centre London and, in
2010, a solo show at MoMA. A retrospective of her work is planned in Cologne for 2014. A little taste of her work here, an equally busy & serene
music video for the latest single "I want to stay sober for you" of my all-time favourite Hamburg electronic punk art band Tocotronic.
Finally,
special mention to one nation that could do no wrong at this year's EMAF in my view: Austria. Long known for its media arts might, but still astoundingly playful and surreal, technically innovative and memorable in a sea of 1-105 minute videos and films.
by Jutta Brendemuehl
