Participants

The Seminar leader

Ruth Noack, an art historian, writer, teacher and exhibition maker, became known to the global art world as curator of documenta 12. Between 2019 and 2022, she acted as Executive Director and Curator of The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C., where she produced the exhibitions The Mental Body, on aesthetic acts of self-creation and self-care, Stay Alive to Life, on resilience in times of COVID, See You There, on making history at Whitman-Walker and When We First Arrived..., an exhibition which amplified testimonies of children detained at the US-Mexico border through the works of 123 visual artists (in collaboration with DYKWTCA). Noack’s
cycle of sketch exhibitions Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life was shown in Athens, Prag, Beijing and, in its most recent iteration, at Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2019/20). Leader of a Roaming Academy at the Dutch Art Institute (2015-19) and Head of Curating Contemporary Art at The Royal College in London (2012/2013), Noack has taught at universities and academies for more than 20 years. She has also given lectures frequently, widely and internationally. She has authored a monograph on Sanja Iveković and edited Agency, Ambivalence, Analysis. Approaching the Museum with Migration in Mind (2013). Her essays on Eva Hesse, Mary Kelly, Mary Ellen Carroll, Roger Hjorns, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Anna Daučíková, Maria Bartuszov á, Alejandra Riera, Danica Dakić, George Osodi a.o. have been published in cataloges and journals, such as Afterall and Camera Austria. In 2002/3, she served President of the Austrian AICA.

The Seminar participants

Teona Galgoțiu is a film director, writer and cultural manager from Bucharest, Romania, currently living in Berlin. Her short films were screened in festivals such as Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Flaherty New York, BIEFF, Alternative Film/Video Belgrade, and her texts published in anthologies and online platforms, debuting with the poetry book „I look back and it’s gone” in 2020. She has been organising the Super International Film Festival since 2014, which focuses on education trough art for teenagers, and she is the founder of Gura Mare, a project which explores poetry through interdisciplinary projects. In 2020, Teona worked as a curator for One World Romania International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival and started organising the poetry workshop part of ART200 Queer Art Festival.

Jue Yang is a writer, filmmaker, artist and critic. Many of her writings are auto-ethnographic, in which she uses personal and familial experiences to discuss collective cultural memory. As a filmmaker and artist, she works with text, sound, video and most recently, installation. From Jue: "My methods are informed by making documentaries and writing essays. When making a film, I 'write' — or, in other words, compose — it with images, sounds and captions. To me, composition is two-folded: not only do I employ the viewfinder to compose the rectangular image, I use the process of film editing to elaborate the amorphous relationships among visual, audial and textual surfaces. Through the development of installation, I am extending my composition into the realm of physical space." Themes in her films include home, personal agency, cycle of life, language and time. Jue is a contributor to the Dutch art magazine, Metropolis M, and the film website, Talking Shorts.

Tulapop Saenjaroen is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Bangkok, Thailand. His recent works interrogate the correlations between image production and production of subjectivity as well as the paradoxes intertwining control and freedom in late capitalism. In combining narrative and the essay film genre, he investigates on subjects such as tourism, self care and free labor through re-making and re-interpreting the produced images and their networks. Saenjaroen received his MFA in Fine Art Media from The Slade School of Fine Art and MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts.

Saenjaroen’s works have been shown in exhibitions and screenings internationally including Locarno Film Festival; International Film Festival Rotterdam; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; Images Festival, Toronto; DOK Leipzig; Chicago International Film Festival; Curtas Villa do Conde; CROSSROADS at SFMOMA; Abandon Normal Devices Festival, UK; FICVALDIVI, Chile; the Museum of the Moving Image, NYC; Harvard Film Archive; 25FPS, Zagreb; Conversations at the Edge, Gene Siskel FIlm Center Chicago, Kasseler DokFest; Vancouver International Film Festival; Image Forum, Tokyo; Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival; Open City Documentary, London; Athens International Film +Video Festival; 100 Tonson Gallery; Display Gallery Prague; NUS Museum, Singapore; Seoul International New Media Festival; and the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; among other venues. Saenjaroen won awards from Winterthur, Jarkata (Akripel), Moscow, Singapore, and Thailand.

Anisa Hosseinnezhad is an Iranian Artist and Filmmaker. Her film and video work focuses on issues of displacement, immigration, and the militaristic U.S. imaginary. Her research is centered on West Asia, as rendered through by western media and its frequent collaborator the U.S. military-industrial complex.

Hagere Selam "shimby" Zegeye-Gebrehiwot is an artist, administrator, and writer based in so-called Canada. Their research and community building practices centre queer, feminist, bipoc, and analog moving image futures. Currently, they are the Executive Director at the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, co_Director of WNDX Festival of Moving Image and guest editor of the forthcoming Art&Wonder publication.

Helena Gouveia Monteiro is a visual artist and experimental filmmaker from Portugal. She received her MFA from the ENSA Villa Arson in Nice in 2015 and lives and works in Dublin.
Concerned with the history of technical images and influenced by experimental cinema and media archaeology, she creates films, books, and multi-media installations that engage different levels of visual and cultural recognition to question our perception of language and audio-visual experiences.
Her work has been shown internationally in both cinema and gallery spaces and she is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and by Fingal County Council. The recent experimental short film “Purkyně’s Dusk” is distributed by Light Cone Paris and was screened at Oberhausen International Film Festival, in the Experimental Competition at Vila do Conde International Film Festival, and at Rencontres Cinéma et Vidéo de Nice in 2021. She is currently working on “Man of Aral” (Arts Council Film Project Award 2022).
She was a resident at Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin and Light Cone Atelier 105 in Paris in 2020, and at Hangar in Lisbon, Leitrim Sculpture Centre, and L’Abominable Coop Film Lab in Paris in 2021.
She is the co-founder of Stereo Editions, an independent publishing collective of artists’ editions and currently co-directs the LUX Critical Forum Dublin. Website: http://thesocietyofspectacles.com/

Yana Eva Thönnes, born 1990, is a director, writer and actress. Yana studied theater directing at the HfMT Hamburg and philosophy and cultural studies in the Ruhr Area. From 2015-2017 Yana worked as an assistant director at Münchner Kammerspiele, working with Toshiki Okada, Britta Thie, Gob Squad, Simon Stone and Wolfgang Tillmans.

In 2015, she founded the performance company THE AGENCY with Magdalena Emmerig, Rahel Spöhrer and Belle Santos and has since served as its director. THE AGENCY’s work immersively experiments with the manifestations of neoliberalism. Their performances, in which audience members are gently involved as customers or future members, revolve around subversive options of agency: How are our desires, our feelings, our identities and political movements formed in the post-digital age? And how is it possible under these conditions to create counter-emotions, counter-identities, counter-movements? THE AGENCY’s body of work struggles for a utopian potential from a queer-feminist perspective while examining our entanglements with the uncanny horrors of our times.

Yana’s work as a director and performer with THE AGENCY has been shown at Münchner Kammerspiele, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Pact Zollverein, Athens Biennale, FFT Düsseldorf, Tanz im August, Festival Internacionales de Buenos Aires, HAU Berlin, Bayerische Staatsoper and Radikal Jung, among others. Yana has received grants from the Saison Foundation Tokyo, the City of Munich, the International Forum Theatertreffen Berlin, and the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Her artistic research has taken her to residencies in Japan, the USA and India.
Furthermore, she has been a lecturer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich, the Universität der Künste Berlin and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, among others.

In 2022 Yana finished her first movie “White Out” - dealing with the preparations of a young man planning an amok run - with her close collaborator Leonard von Hammerstein. Since then she has been fascinated with the level of immersion and intimacy created by the camera.

Paige Taul (b.1996) is an Oakland, CA native who received her BA in Studio Art with a concentration in Cinematography from the University of Virginia and her MFA in Moving Image from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work engages with and challenges assumptions of black cultural expression and notions of belonging through experimental cinematography. As a part of her filmmaking practice she tests the boundaries of identity and self-identification through autoethnography to approach notions of racial authenticity in veins such as religion, style, language, and other black community-based experiences.

Paige's work has been exhibited at venues including UnionDocs, CROSSROADS at SFMOMA, EXPO Chicago, Virginia Film Festival and Block Cinema.

Carlos Ormeño Palma (1994) is a Peruvian filmmaker, director of La Fiebre Films and alumnus of La Fémis - Université d'été 2021, Berlinale Talents 2022, and Talents Buenos Aires 2021. His passion as a filmmaker is born from the memories of his family and the shades of identity.

Since he started making films, Carlos has developed an interest in recreating different worlds within the absent figure of his father. He’s currently developing his first hybrid feature film entitled “The scent of Walls”, recently selected in CineQuaNonLab in Mexico.

His latest short film, “The distance of Time” has been selected in Raindance, Oberhausen, and the International Film Festival of Uruguay. His second short “The Weight of Air” won the Peruvian National Fund for Short Films and in 2021, he directed “The unknown language of the setting Sun” in France during his studies at La Fémis.

In 2019, he published “The borders of transsexuality in Latin American cinema”, an article about the representation of trans women in six Latin-American films, and in 2017, he worked as 1AD in the film "Song without a Name" by Melina León.

Website: https://www.lafiebrefilms.com

María Contreras is a Colombian filmmaker, visual artist, and anthropologist based in Lisbon. She is interested in documentary, experimental and hybrid films that express alternative social and visual narratives from a female and migrant perspective. Studied Anthropology at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ) and earned her master's degree in Cinema from the Universidade da Beira Interior (UBI). Currently she is working as a documentalist for the Institution Cultivamos Cultura and directing a documentary in collaboration with the research group W@Arhc.pt, about women in architecture in Portugal between 1942 and 1986. As a visual artist, in 2022/2023 she will be exhibiting in a project for the dissemination of Portuguese art and artists in the international airports in Washington DC called ArtBox.
Her filmography as a director includes The Namelessness Dance (second place in the Sophia Student Award for Best Experimental Short of the Portuguese Academy of Cinema) and co-directed Catarse (Award for Best Experimental Short at the Porto Femme Film Festival). Participated in the DocLisboa '19 Filmmaker Seminar (Portugal, 2019); in the Young Critics Workshop at the European Film Festival (Serbia, 2019), and the ACAMPADOC International Documentary Film Camp (Panamá, 2016).
Website: https://maria-angelica-contreras.com/

Leeroy Kang is an archivist, independent film curator, and interdisciplinary scholar based in Los Angeles, California. His work reframes notions of the “invisible” and “hidden” through positioning concealment and opacity as radical embodiments of refusal, protection, and care by artists and filmmakers working with experimental non-fiction forms. Leeroy has curated programs for Anthology Film Archives, Los Angeles Filmforum, Visual AIDS, and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival among other institutional and experimental settings. He currently works at the Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has worked with archival collections at several other institutions including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Viacom/MTV Networks, as well as with many non-institutionalized artists’ collections. Leeroy was a 2016 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University from 2016-2019. This fall, he will begin a PhD in Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley as a Chancellor’s Fellowship recipient.

Marie-Pierre Bonniol is an artist, curator and producer based in Berlin. She holds a MA (Maîtrise) in Visual Arts from the University of Aix-Marseille, and a MA in Aesthetics and Sciences of art from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her current main research subjects are experimental film and video art, especially in relation to childhood.
Since 2017, she's been developing a film practice often at the cross with music which has been presented at ZKM, Anthology Film Archives, Café OTO, Alchemy Film & Arts, Stuttgarter Filmwinter and the National Library of Argentina.
Since 2020, she's the curator of programmes of short experimental films for children (Experiment 120) which have been presented by several institutions, such as Centre Pompidou Metz and CAPC in France. In 2023, she will collaborate with Xcèntric/CCCB in Barcelona with two programmes.

Often collective, her film work includes since 2020 a collaboration with her eldest son Walter Duncan, born in 2012, within a general articulation of a part of her work with her family life, in an integrative perspective. She's currently developing with him a 60 minutes experimental film on video games, images and media for children. Spring 2022, they toured in the US (New York, Los Angeles, Seattle) with their films.

Her works are distributed by Collectif Jeune Cinéma and The Film-Maker's Cooperative.
https://mariepierrebonniol.com
https://www.instagram.com/mariepierrebonniol
Photo credit: Philippe Lebruma

Clara Miranda Scherffig is an Italian writer and film professional based in Berlin, Germany. After some time in independent publishing (Vice, Archive Books), she shifted her focus to film while completing her M.A. in Visual Anthropology. She specialized in sales and marketing of art-house films, working on titles by established and upcoming auteurs alike (including Jessica Hausner, Roy Andersson, Susanne Heinrich) and recently started to collaborate with festivals focussing on moving-image works (BFMAF Berwick, EMAF Osnabrück). Today she oversees festivals and distribution at the Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University while freelancing as a consultant for debut features (TFLAB Torino, Screen Institute Vienna) and as a writer/critic for a number of Italian and English-speaking outlets (Sole 24 Ore, Reverse Shot, Cinema Scope, Screen Slate, Another Gaze, il Tascabile among others). Clara is an alumna of the Locarno Critics Academy and the Torino Film Lab Audience Design programme. Website: https://cmirffig.com/

Yashaswi Dixit is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist primarily working in experimental video and short-form documentary. Her work blends performance, magical thinking, and animation with hybrid modes of nonfiction filmmaking. She is most interested in issues of memory and trauma (both collective and personal), archives, and the surreal and sensory experiences which inform our everyday lives.
Yashaswi is a 2021 Flaherty Fellow and a Future Faculty Fellow at Temple University, where she is currently pursuing an MFA in Film & Media Arts. Yashaswi is currently working on her thesis, an experimental animated film about OCD and the end of the world.

Nonfiction filmmaker and Arts Researcher, Tushar Madhav is drawn toward exploring histories rendered by the artistic practices of people or communities in conflict. He writes, directs, and edits creative documentary films and pursued M.A. in Mass Communication at AJK MCRC Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi (2007-09).

His first film ‘A Ballad of Maladies’ (2016, India, 85 min) negotiated for a space for arts amidst the festering political conflict and military occupation of Indian-administered Kashmir by exploring the lens of its contemporary musicians, artists, and poets. Denied telecast by its producers at Doordarshan, the national television network of India, the film screened across international film festivals, cultural institutions, and universities, winning notable awards such as Best Film at the 10th IDSFFK and 11th Film South Asia, as well as the 64th National Film Award of India for Best Debut Director.

As an editor, Tushar has worked on award-winning documentary films and series. Beyond film practice, he also lectures at universities and colleges in India.

In 2021, he collaborated with Goethe Institut, Mumbai towards co-writing, devising, and performing ‘The Lonely Hearts Club’ (Dir: Anuja Ghosalkar), an online documentary theater show that explores erotica in the times of pandemic.

Since 2018, with the support of research and documentary fellowships (India Foundation for the Arts 2018-19, Raza Foundation 2019-20, Uniondocs 2019, and Cité Internationale des Arts 2021-22) Tushar has been researching the suicide of Indian painter Jangarh Singh Shyam. Based on his artistic research, he is presently completing the production of the short documentary “Detour” (IF/Then - Shifting Landscapes Lab 2022) and developing a feature-length animated documentary “Another World” (Catapult Film Fund, DMZ Docs Fund).

Website: www.basicbaefilms.com

Emil Klattenhoff, born in the 90s, lives and works in Munich where he currently studies directing for documentary film at University of Television and Film. He grew up in Essen and has also lived in Berlin and Paris. Next to his studies, he has been part of the „Labour in a Single Shot“ workshop hosted by the Harun Farocki Institute, worked for the Kammerspiele Theater, edited video work for the Berliner Festspiele archive and is one of the founding members of the REVÜ film magazine. He further directed 4 short films, as solo and co-director, which were screened at different film festivals. He just finished his latest work „Good Day“ and will start researching his first feature film. In his work he investigates into narrative structures of care and the restitutional power storytelling.

Linnéa Haviland is an experimental filmmaker, animator and visual artist from Stockholm, Sweden. She studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin, before completing a degree in Illustration and Animation at Kingston University in London. Her work explores the politics of representation, and tensions between self expression and societal narratives. Her practice is participatory and process-led, and she likes to play with narrative assumptions and visual language. She often works cross-disciplinary, many times in collaboration with poets as well as with young people and children. Her work has been screened at festivals such as Oberhausen, BFI Flare and ZINEBI and been exhibited at galleries such as The Barbican, Wellcome Collection and Gerald Moore Gallery. In 2019 she started and curated the initiative 'Exis!' with free interactive screenings and workshops on experimental animation for young children in the London borough of Southwark.

Anuj Malhotra is the founder of Lightcube, an acclaimed film collective, regularly touted as one of the leading resources for pioneering research and presentation of image-forms in the country. The collective organized close to twenty film festivals and three hundred single exhibitions in the nine years of its existence. He also helped conceive the model for The Dhenuki Cinema Project, a multifaceted and versatile project that mobilizes populations in rural areas of the country through the medium of film. Anuj also publishes Umbra, the country’s only newspaper devoted to the study of alternative film in India, alongwith handling the curatorial duties for The Garga Archives, a digital museum dedicated to the life and work of B.D. Garga. His work as a critic has been published in such prestigious publications as photogenie, Asian Film Archive, Woche Der Kritik, mubi, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, Deep Focus Cinema, and cinea.be.

His films have screened at various festivals and venues across the country and internationally. Mayadweep, a documentary on the politics of water in the desert state of Rajasthan, which he edited and directed, played at various festivals across the country. Furthermore, his films, Gaurav Chale Gaya (2021) and Yeh Woh (2020) played at festivals in North America and Europe. He recently finished Tales from Building No. 37 (2021), a film funded under Project 560, an initiative supported by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA).
Anuj has been invited to present talks or installations at such prestigious forums as Goldsmiths University, Alternative Film and Video Research Forum (Belgrade, Serbia) , Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, UK), Five Million Incidents (New Delhi, India), Woche Der Kritik (Berlin, Germany), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, Germany) and Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, India).

Johanna Laub has been a PhD candidate and fellow at the research collective “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt since 2020, which investigates the life and use of moving images outside the cinema. After completing her B.A. and M.A. in art history at the University of Leipzig and Université de Tours, she worked as a curatorial assistant at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2017–2020), where she was involved in exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and hosted artist talks for the screening program “Double Feature”. She will be a visiting scholar at Concordia University, Montreal, in the fall of 2022.
Her research is invested in contemporary art as a form of knowledge production and epistemic disobedience, and she is particularly interested in artists’ exploration of historiography, archaeology and the politics of preservation. Her dissertation project investigates the re- and deconstructions of social and political histories through experimental moving image art. Currently she is trying to think about film archives in states of ruination, the circulation of fragments and the shape of digital debris.
Website: https://konfigurationen-des-films.de/en/member/johanna-laub/

Ale Bachlechner is an artist working with performance and video, based in Cologne. She has a diploma in Comparative Literature and one from the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her works include the temporary dating agency „Twelve Roses“ (2013) in Beirut, the performance coaching institute „This Is Not A Competition“ (2016) and the online TV series „Studio Hallo“ (2018). From 2018-2021 she was a member of the Junges Kolleg of the the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts and had several teaching positions at universities in Cologne, Greifswald and Weimar. Her works are in the archive and distribution of the imai Foundation Düsseldorf and have been presented at festivals, symposia and exhibitions e.g.: Art Cologne, Videonale, Impulse, EMAF Osnabrück, Kasseler Dokfest, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and Diagonale. Upcoming in July is her artist monograph "I'm sure everybody's doing their best" at DISTANZ Verlag, Berlin.

Websites: alebachlechner.com & studiohallo.de