The Seminar leader
Salla Tykkä lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. She did her MFA in Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki 1995-2003. During her studies she focused on photography and moving image as her main medium. In her video and film works Tykkä have utilized different formal strategies from short fiction to experimental feature long documentary. Her practise is rooted in the female experience especially in the act of looking and becoming to see and seen. Disassembling, reframing and rethinking images and scenes of images Tykkä unveils their connections with the political and structural power often hidden in everyday visual narratives. She is interested how through creative processes emotional, fragile, and personal can fuel political and critical stance to life and work.
Since 2017 Tykkä works as Professor for Moving Image and Contemporary Arts in the University of Arts, Academy of Arts, in Helsinki.
Since 2017 Tykkä works as Professor for Moving Image and Contemporary Arts in the University of Arts, Academy of Arts, in Helsinki.
The Seminar participants
Ejla Kovačević is a Croatian film critic, curator and independent/experimental film researcher. She’s been a long-time collaborator of the 25 FPS Festival where she initiated a symposium Analog Film in the Digital Age dedicated to the contemporary analog film theory and practice. In 2020 she joined the curatorial team of Analog Film Festival KINOSKOP (Serbia) and Glitch Art Festival /'fu:bar/ (Croatia). Active member of Zagreb-based filmlab Klubvizija since 2011, she organized numerous workshops, screenings and held lectures on experimental and photochemical cinema. As an Erasmus scholar she spent a semester working in filmmakers’ cooperative LIGHT CONE in Paris. She received her M.A. in French Language at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb.
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Rouzbeh Rashidi (born in Tehran, 1980) is an Iranian-Irish filmmaker. He has been making films since 2000, at which time he founded the Experimental Film Society in Tehran. Rashidi has always worked entirely away from mainstream conceptions of filmmaking, striving to escape conventional storytelling stereotypes. Instead, he roots his cinematic style in a poetic interaction of image and sound. He generally eschews scriptwriting, seeing the process of making moving images as exploration rather than illustration. His work is deeply engaged with film history, and primarily concerned with mysticism, philosophy, esotericism, cosmology, phenomenology, and hauntology. The films are wildly experimental and often surrealist, magical realist, and mysterious, and have been associated with the Remodernist movement. They are unified by his oneiric imagination, idiosyncratic working methods, and the dreamlike experience of watching them. More info, here: http://rouzbehrashidi.com/
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Amanda Costa de Sousa is a filmmaker born and raised in Brazil. She holds an MA in Film Studies from Eötvös Loránd University, located in Budapest, Hungary, where she currently lives and works. After graduating with honours in 2021, her thesis short film, Guy at the Bridge, was awarded with the FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics) Prize on its premiere at the 17th CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival, and it has been screened in many festivals around the world. Her work deals mostly with personal traumas and conflicts, alongside with exploring the magic realism movement in Eastern European cinema, the theme of her master’s degree theses. Amanda has directed short films and music videos, she also works as first assistant director and production manager for independent productions. Currently working on a short film inspired by her grandmother's life, her filmmaking practice aims to challenge the boundaries between real, fictional and magical.
Webpage: https://amandacostasousa.wixsite.com/films Instagram: @venusinarts |
Hanwen Zhang is an artist and filmmaker based in Changchun and Shanghai. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and received the SAH Film and Video Award. Zhang has participated in several artist residencies, including the Fosun Foundation Art Residency in Shanghai, the BRIClab Video Art Residency in New York, the UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab in New York, and the VSC Artist-in-Residency in Vermont. His work has been exhibited and screened at various venues and film festivals, including Power Station of Art, OCAT Institute, SVA Theater, Aotu Space, CACHE Space, and BBC LongShots.
Taking photographs and video/film, Zhang utilizes documentary as a narrating and self-reflective device and further incorporates sounds, installations, and writings. His work is based on artistic research and field studies and typically involves examining mundane objects or activities through lenses or visual studies. He contemplates these subjects as still or moving images within a broad spectrum of local, transnational, historical, and ideological contexts. During this process, he reflects on the technological trajectory and physical existence of photography, video, and film, as well as their entanglement to subject matters ranging from individual living conditions, stories, love, and memory, to collective archive, narrative, trauma, and identities. |
Joy Young / Ji Yang
A cross-media art-tech storytelling experimentalist and entrepreneur in cinema, Joy holds a BFA and MFA at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and USC School of Cinematic Arts, and an MBA at University of Cambridge under the Arts, Media and Culture Scholarship. As an cinematic writer and artist, she creates art and narratives grounded in geometry, science and logic, imagined through surrealist, cubist and conceptual art principles. Through solid yet flexible structures filled with subtle abstract subconsciousness, Joy explores originality, duality and universality while examining social issues and norms, such as cross-cultural diaspora, femininity, sexuality, and identities. An example is her highly experimental yet also narrative cinematic style. Her body of works narratively advocating social issues while stylistically pushing cinematic boundaries, shown at dozens of international film festivals helps her selected as a Berlinale Talent as a writer/director. She developed a method of 360VR-for-2DCinema for her experimental feature film, that has a connected installation “Cubist Cinema” to bridge the Big Screen and VR/digitalization between art and technologies. She also created an art-tech interactive theatre experience at Cambridge University’s ADC Theatre with VR, drone performance, hologram and wearable tech in a cinematic story. Both projects were based on her feature film screenplays under development. Joy is inspired to pioneer cinema in both Eastern and Western perspectives without borders, through both structured narratives for storytelling and experimental surrealism for her sight and sound language. She accumulated cinematic experiences as she worked for dozens of industry veterans and companies like assisting/covering scripts for Office of Jane Rosenthal at Tribeca Films. As the Executive Assistant to Renny Harlin at Alibaba Pictures and Jackie Chan’s production Skiptrace, she explored script development and filmmaking methodologies. With the above and other dozens of in-depth and wide industry experiences, personal artistic style explorations and her MBA at Cambridge, apart from directing/writing towards an auteur, Joy is also founding an art-tech startup of a cinematic digital platform to add new values to both the current art and commercial film industry landscape. She was born in China and moved to Singapore on the SM1 government scholarship. A professional “mixer” of everything in the world, Joy connects cinema, fine art and technology, the east and the west. |
Toby Wu is a writer and PhD Student in the department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He researches Contemporary Art, through the Transpacific, elemental media theory and the environmental humanities.
Toby holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Nanyang Technological University. He has worked in curatorial and research positions at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, KADIST Art Foundation (San Francisco), and the National Gallery Singapore. He has also developed film programs with Southside Projections (Chicago) and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila). His criticism, interviews and profiles of artists can be found in Senses of Cinema, Boston Art Review and Art & Market. Toby is an inaugural Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow, and was a Flaherty Seminar Curatorial Fellow (2022) and an inaugural Asia Art Archive in America & PoNJA GenKon Fellow (2021).
Toby holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Nanyang Technological University. He has worked in curatorial and research positions at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, KADIST Art Foundation (San Francisco), and the National Gallery Singapore. He has also developed film programs with Southside Projections (Chicago) and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (Manila). His criticism, interviews and profiles of artists can be found in Senses of Cinema, Boston Art Review and Art & Market. Toby is an inaugural Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow, and was a Flaherty Seminar Curatorial Fellow (2022) and an inaugural Asia Art Archive in America & PoNJA GenKon Fellow (2021).
Charmaine Poh is an artist working across media and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. Her current focus, THE YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE, is a series of enactments considering the potentialities of the feminist techno-body. She is a co-founder of Jom, a magazine about Singapore. In the fall of 2022, she started her PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin. She lives and works between Berlin and Singapore.
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Binha* Haase's work focuses on video art and film. Their works often deal with queerfeminist topics, especially with realities of FLINTA with a focus on voice and body like in their filmic works “lamento”, “en travesti” or “#popfem” (made in collaboration with Sara Glojnaric). Based on heavy research they often build hybrids between fiction and documentary. Binhas works have been shown at the European Media Art Festival, in the Museum of Art Lucerne, in the Opera Halle, at Contemporary Art Ruhr and at Sonic Matter Zurich among others and have been awarded the soundzz.z.zzz...z Prize 2016 (Museum of Art Lucerne), the Kranichsteiner Music Prize 2018 (Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt) and an approval of the Kunstpreis der Saalesparkasse 2021. Binha was fellow of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, the Kunstfonds Bonn and others and studied music at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and Timebased Arts at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. They were a participant of the Professional Media Master Class Werkleitz 2022. www.binhahaase.org
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Francesca Svampa is a transnational filmmaker born in Italy, based in Barcelona, Spain.
She is interested in identity, migration, feminism, socio-political relations and finding a language to investigate and explore these experiences. Her practice revolves around handmade analogue cinema, mixed formats, amateur filmmaking, first person cinema and alternative narratives. She graduated from the Master in Essay Film in EICTV (Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión) in Cuba and she also has a background in Economics, Performing Arts and Music. Her works have been exhibited and won awards in several film festivals, including Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Athens Film + Video Festival, Revolutions Per Minute, Bellaria Film Festival, Alcances, Catania Film Festival, among others. Her project “A movie in a pic”, an exploration of the liminal area between photography and film, has been a finalist in the “Open Panoramic” contest. She works in analogue and digital films and her production includes documentary, essay, experimental films and video art pieces. She put attention on the means of production and the implications they have. She looks for appropriation of means of production and autonomous independent cinema. |
Jack Guariento is a filmmaker from Glasgow, Scotland with a background in social anthropology and community development. He is interested in the politics of space and place and in film's potential as a tool for radical empowerment. He is always thinking about the way in which film & moving image can be utilised in the struggle for social change, both as a practical tool for bearing witness to and chronicling struggles - that we might learn and grow from them - but also as a space of speculation through which new worlds and ways of living may be imagined and tested.
He recently curated an evening of short films related to housing activism at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and currently works as a programming assistant for Iberodocs. His own short films have been shown at various national and international film festivals, as well as by local institutions and activist/civil society groups. He is currently in post-production on his first narrative short, ‘The Letter.’ |
Charlotte Jacoby, born in 1987 in Hamburg, is a freelance video and animation artist based in Berlin. Besides her independent work, she is currently completing her master's degree at Kunsthochschule Weißensee.
Since 2017, Charlotte has been exploring the traces of her paternal ancestors, which has led her to Finland, Estonia and Russia. This process is accompanied by collecting and producing various materials: archival material, texts, photos, Super 8 films, documentary video and audio material, animation sequences. She always conceives herself as an unknowing within this process - collecting materials is an intuitive process, the result of which she does not yet know. The narrations of her work only emerge during the editing process, in which she assembles the different fragments. Since 2019, the protagonist of her films has been her alter ego, the spider. Thematically, she explores topics such as memories, transgenerational transmission of trauma and memory, identity and family history. |
Eunice Helera is a Filipino film programmer, and journalist based in Quezon City, Philippines. Her film and research interests include film festival management, audience reception, community-based screenings, and Asian cinema. She also focuses on themes such as memory, space, and politics. She joined Piecs Smakow’s (Five Flavours Film Festival) Journalism on Asian Cinema (Poland) in 2021 and the University of Hong Kong’s (HKU) Hong Kong Cinema Through a Global Lens (Hong Kong) in 2022. She was a festival curatorial fellow for Movies that Matter’s Cinema Without Borders (Netherlands) in 2021, a film criticism fellow for UP Cinema’s Pelikolektibo (Philippines) and an alumna of Udine FAR EAST FILM festival CAMPUS programme (Italy) in 2022. She has been a jury and selection committee member for several local and international student film festivals. She is a festival consultant for Pandayang Lino Brocka: Political Film and New Media Festival.
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Alžběta Bačíková (*1988) is an artist based in Prague.
She focuses on the medium of the moving image and works primarily with video installation. In the past years, Bačíková has dealt with reflection of documentary tendencies in contemporary art both in her theoretical research and her artistic practice. She has made a series of video-portraits of real or fictional figures. In 2018 she finished her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. She was a resident at Art in General in New York (2019), Artist-in-Residence Programme at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna (2018) and the finalist of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2018). Between the years 2017–2020 she worked as a curator of the Etc. Gallery in Prague. Currently she works as the head of an online platform Artycok.TV. More about Alžběta Bačíková's work: https://alzbetabacikova.com/About |
Yi Cui is a filmmaker and teacher from China. She studied conservation ecology before moving into filmmaking. Her film work embraces a process-driven approach and explores the boundaries among diverse cinematic forms. A series of her works were created under the theme of “Migrating Cinema”, and studied the linkage among travelling film projection, Indigenous cinema, auto-ethnography and ancient screen art such as the shadow theatre. In recent years, Yi has been working in the communities of eastern Tibet to facilitate herdsmen, monks and young students making their own films. This experience is gradually growing into a personal film essay that she’s currently working on.
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Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė is a Lithuanian artist and a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Film and Screen, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on artists’ moving image installations and their capacity for affect and experiential critique. Geistė works at the intersection of film and screen studies, contemporary art, and philosophy.
In her creative photographic and moving image practice, she explores notions of belonging, alienation, and the unknown. Overall, Geistė's practice is defined by encounters with the eerie, which is understood to be both the cessation of a comfort zone — whether self, human, habit, habitat, milieu — and alertness to a yet-to-be-identified presence. Since 2014, her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Norway, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. www.geistekincinaityte.com |
Don O'Mahony
Having commenced his involvement with Cork International Film Festival as part of their selection committee in 1999, Don O'Mahony is Senior Programmer with the festival. He has been in charge of the festival’s experimental programme, Free Radicals, since 2004. This has recently broadened into Parallax, a programming section he oversees that unites the strands where the festival collaborates with artist organisations, galleries and artist and moving image initiatives. He has overseen the festival’s short film programming since 2016. |
Ali Vanderkruyk is an experimental filmmaker living and working between Los Angeles and Toronto. Her research-based practice involves/includes physical vs. online landscapes, theories of haptics, gendered dynamics and critical historiography in national archives. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts. |
Ginou Choueiri is an interdisciplinary artist working across mediums of painting and moving image. Her work taps into personal experience exploring notions of displacement, longing and belonging. She is interested in the in-between space where the inner/outer, visible / invisible intersect. She completed an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image at Goldsmiths University in London where she graduated with high distinction as well as winning the prestigious Warden's prize for best work in the year’s cohort. Her documentary film "Rhythm of Forgetting”, premiered at DocLisboa and won numerous awards. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Contemporary Art Center of Barcelona (Spain), Merz Foundation (Italy), and Williamsburg Art Center (USA). She is also ArteEast’s film programs curator and is based in between Beirut and New York.
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Hsin-Yu Chen is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Taipei, Taiwan. He works with experimental film, documentary and moving image to explore the liminal space between seeing and being seen where subjectivity is implicated and constructed. Drawing on border landscapes, vision techniques, and sensory experience, he examines the intersection of the viewing body and the political subject. His work has been exhibited at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, UK; WNDX Festival of Moving Image, CN; and Athens International Film + Video Festival, US. He has participated in residencies including RAIR Philadelphia and Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris.
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Sonia Knop is an artist and film director. She studied fine arts and video at Städelschule Frankfurt am Main and Cooper Union New York (2020) until 2022. She was in the class of Judith Hopf. She has been a scholarship recipient of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Fund. Knop’s work was shown in Biennale Mulhouse 023 2023, German Film Museum DFF 2022, La Nièce Nice 2022, Kunstverein Bad Honnef 2022, 67. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2021, New Wight Biennial UCLA Los Angeles 2020, On Art Film Festival Poland 2020, Laterale Film Festival Italy 2020, La Plata International Independent Film Festival Argentina 2020, Opelvillen Rüsselsheim 2019, Festival of Young Talents Frankfurter Kunstverein 2018, Kornhäuschen Aschaffenburg 2018, Center For Contemporary Art Tel-Aviv 2016.
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Ivor Glavaš is a small-time filmmaker, technologist of obsolete media, teacher of image making. Informed by education in cultural anthropology and philosophy, his work roams from immediacy to transformation of esperiencess thro recorded media. As a part of Klubvizija Lab and Multimedia Institute Zagreb he is devoted to variety of artistic programs, seminars and publishing. Every spring he runs a small neighbourhood cinema on a rooftop of a building.
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Aderinsola Ajao is an arts manager, film curator, and journalist based in Lagos, Nigeria. Her work cuts across the creative and cultural industries, and her writing has appeared in publications including Chimurenga, Africiné, Awotele, MUBI’s Notebook, Glänta, The Sun, La Furia Umana and The Hollywood Reporter. She was previously Programme Officer at Goethe-Institut Nigeria, and is currently Regional Programme Manager for West/Central Africa at the Johannesburg office of Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council. Aderinsola has participated in the Fespaco/Africiné Critics’ Workshop; the Berlinale and Durban Talents Press; CICAE’s Arthouse Cinema Management Workshop, and the Southern Africa – Locarno Industry Academy. She was on film juries at DOK Leipzig, Márgenes Film Festival, Film Africa, and CPH:DOX. She is a programme adviser for Sheffield DocFest's 30th edition and a guest curator for the 15th Go Short International Film Festival. Aderinsola is also the founder and curator of Screen Out Loud, an independent cinema programme organized in partnership with Alliance Française Lagos.
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Ira Goryainova is a filmmaker, audiovisual artist and researcher, lives and works in Belgium. She graduated from the Brussels’ RITCS (Royal Institute for Theatre, Cinema & Sound) documentary film department. Her master film Die Ruinen Von Europa – a hybrid docufiction loosely based on Heiner Mü ller’s Die Hamletmaschine – won the wildcard prize of the VAF (Flanders Audiovisual Fund) for best documentary. In 2019, she created a documentary essay film Bile, in which she gets to work with tons of archives, her own film footage as well as medical imaging material – all established around her main field of interests and research: the notions of body and gaze.Between 2017 and 2022 Goryainova conducted a PhD research in the arts at RITCS and VUB (Free University of Brussels), exploring the relationships between the three elements of spectatorship in audiovisual arts, i.e. the portrayed body, the perceiving body and the film discipline.
Thematically, Goryainova’s focus lies on the body within extreme conditions – such as illness, death and suffering – and how they can be read as political metaphors yet also convey explicitly bodily, non-narrative meanings. In addition to the classic film screen, she transforms these topics into video installations and performances. Ira’s work was shown amongst others at IDFA (Amsterdam), Hot Docs (Toronto), Visions du Reel (Nyon), Thessaloniki Film Festival, Artdocfest (Moscow), Argos (Brussels), Halle Für Kunst Steiermark (Graz), ISELP (Brussels), RIDM (Montreal), Imagine Science Film Festival (New York), Deutches Theater (Berlin), etc. Currently she is a postdoc researcher, as well as hybrid and documentary film teacher at RITCS, Brussels. https://iragoryainova.com/ |
Kira Adibekov
Film and moving image curator, researcher, filmmaker and a Chevening alumnus (2018/2019). Holds an MA in Film and Screen Cultures from the University of Roehampton, London. Was a member of the CICAE jury at Berlin International Film Festival (2018), a curator of This Is Not (a) Cinema at the Whitechapel Gallery (2019) and a film curator at V-A-C (2018-2022). His works were shown at goEast and Cottbus film festivals while he also appears as Eisenstein's cameraman in Blutsauger (2021). His current research aims at offering a new perspective on historical practices of alternative cinema exhibition such as ciné-clubs, film forums and collectives, co-ops, and their derivatives. |
Jan Thierhoff is a German filmmaker and director whose artistic research focus is currently shifted somewhat away from classical filmmaking and concentrating on interactive, cinematic experiences, theater and the fusion between multiple media and narrative forms.
In 2021 his short film „weg von hier“ („away from here“) premiered at the 67. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Currently he is in post-production for an interactive VR experience/ experiment that uses Scenes shot in 360° Video which will be edited live (in Unity), based on the viewer’s gaze. In 2022 he also co-founded the B-Fest (Germany), a (very) small and cozy open-air B-Movie festival in Cologne. |