The Seminar leader
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Born in Berlin in 1985, Leon Kahane first trained as a photographer and then studied fine art at the Berlin University of the Arts. Central points of reference in his video works, photographs and installations are themes such as migration and identity and the examination of majorities and minorities in a globalised society. He is often interested in the cultural and artistic representation of political developments in the recent past. Time and again, he draws attention to events and institutions in which the contradictions inherent in history are expressed. They reflect historical, political and economic, but also biographical aspects, which he takes up and processes in his works. Above all, the socio-cultural localisation of current political discourses and dynamics is of central importance to his artistic approach, which represents a form of cultural criticism.
Most recently, his works were on display at the Kunsthalle Wien and at the 6th Moscow Biennale. In 2015 he won the Future of Europe Art Prize and in 2016 the ars viva Prize. His work is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler. |
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The Seminar participants
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Stephanie Bergwinkl (she/her) works fragmentarily and raw. Her work includes experimental essay films and interactive performances in which she creates a dialogue with the visitor, often based on a game of chance. In her films, she embeds personal, intimate experiences in fictional narratives and likes to combine different styles of analog and digital recording media. She experiments with color and shape schemes. She is concerned with revealing the hidden, visualizing the inner, and processing pain. Now she is about to finish her studies in Time Based Media at the Art University in Linz with an exchange at the École nationale des beaux-arts de Lyon. In this context she is working on an experimental film about the feeling of being lost.
Website: https://stephaniebergwinkl.hotglue.me/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephsanssouci/ |
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Sophia Küstenmacher (*1998) studied philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig. Her research interests lie in the field of philosophical hermeneutics and narratology.
After working in the commercial film industry, Sophia began studying fictional directing at the University of Television and Film Munich in 2021 and has directed several short films, music videos and commercials ever since. She is also a freelance photographer and writer. She is currently working on several short films and a book about how the plot structures of the films we watch influences how we think about the world – often, film characters are forced to do something that they don't want to, but in the end it always leads to something pleasurable such as love. As prominent as this structure might be in films, it is maybe not often in our real lives that such moments happen to us. So how do we get from waiting for something to happen to making something happen? Website: www.kophia.com |
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Lana Bogdanovskaia, video artist, researcher, documentary filmmaker, curator. I was born in Vladivostok, Russia. From 2017 to 2019, I studied in a related program at Hokkaido University (Japan) in the direction of "Cultural Anthropology of Asian-Pacific Countries", having written my master's thesis on the visual anthropology of cinema in Asia and North America. Since 2019, I've been engaged in documentary directing and visual research in the field of anthropology and ethnology, which over time began to transform into experimental works on identity-forming media. At the moment I'm mainly interested in the problem of preserving the identity of non-contextual groups, which I represent. My family comes from Tatarstan, but I myself do not speak Tatar and never experienced the traditions of my family before I turned 27. Studies of the needs of the individual to preserve and replenish identity are now the main themes of my artistic work.
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Inbar Hagai is a multidisciplinary visual artist and filmmaker whose work spans video, virtual reality, sculpture, and experimental documentary filmmaking. Her long-term projects often meander through a series of narrative rabbit holes, blurring the boundaries between documentation and fantasy, staged and happenstance. This hybrid ethos is used to transgressively examine and reflect on cultural conventions (and their subsequent taboos) around interspecies cohabitation and domination within human-machine-animal relationships, libidinal desires, mass media, spatial actuality, and the breeding and domestication of non-human animals. Relentlessly tongue-in-cheek, Her films are meant to be accompanied by nervous laughter. Hagai gained her BFA with honors from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem, 2017), and is about to graduate with an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, 2024). Her works have been exhibited in venues such as The Center for Digital Art (Holon, 2023), Radiant Hall (PA, US, 2023), Hamidrasha Gallery (Tel Aviv, 2022), Hecht Museum (Haifa, 2021), Palermo Gallery (Stuttgart, Germany, 2016), CICA Museum (South Korea, 2017), Manifesta 11 (Zurich, 2016), and in film and media festivals such as PrintScreen (2019) and DocAviv (2017) in Israel, and NMFF (L.A., 2017), RIFF (Norway, 2017) and On Art (Warsaw, 2017).
website, IG |
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Natalia Zaitseva is a Russian artist based in Leipzig. Since 2012 she has been active as a dramaturg, journalist and writer in the Moscow feminist scene. Her plays were in the repertoire of the Meyerhold Theater Center and other theatres. Since 2022 Natalia Zaitseva has worked as an artist in exile in Leipzig, now she is a student of the Expanded Cinema class at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. In her work she raises questions of the excluded voices, inequality and violence. She is interested in personal narratives and autofiction. Her debut novel, the Mortgage of Misery, was released by the No Kidding Press, a young publisher that has published writers such as Maggy Nelson, Annie Ernaux, Tove Ditlevson and others in Russian for the first time. Zaitseva is currently working on a new book and researching the recent past of the independent theatre scene in Russia, represented mostly by women. Her film work is influenced by theatre, and she likes the idea of not hiding the media, yet working with fictionalised content.
Latest international work: Interview with the Pistol, a one channel video https://vimeo.com/927053446 Password: Piraten |
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Anna Hogg is an artist and filmmaker whose work indulges in the impossible and the unknowable, exploring these fields as productive sites for play and wild flights of imagination. Allowing truth to be unstable and knowledge to be indeterminate, her work “stays with the trouble” of the impossible and the unknowable. She is interested in the ways technology, including that of the cinema and the archive, forms memory, knowledge, and regimes of truth. In particular, she investigates technology’s gaps, dissonances, limits, and failures, beyond which one may speculate alternate ways of knowing and understanding, or even revel in the unknowability of such a space. Grounded in an experimental ethos, her practice spans film, video, animation, sculpture, and installation. Her films have screened internationally, including Prismatic Ground Film Festival, Kasseler DokFest, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Diego Underground Film Festival, and Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She was awarded the Jury prize for Best International Work at the 2017 WNDX Festival, and nominated for the Golden Key award at the 2017 Kasseler DokFest. In 2023, she co-directed and co-founded the inaugural event of the Odds & Ends Film Festival with Light House Studio. She holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches Film at the University of Virginia.
website: www.annahoggfilms.com IG: @annahoggfilms |
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Giancarlo Abrahan (he/they)
Filipino interdisciplinary artist in New York working across film, performance & poetry—director, writer & translator. Lecturer at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. Alumnus of Locarno Filmmakers Academy, Asian Film Academy, Berlinale Talents, and Talents Tokyo. Member of the Asia Pacific Screen Academy. |
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Katia Sophia Ditzler, *1992, majored in Creative Writing and Cultural Anthropology and minored in Musicology as well as Indology/Tibetology/Mongolian Studies. She studied in Leipzig, Berlin, Kyiv, and Moscow. In 2017/18 she was a recipient of the Darmasiswa scholarship and studied karawitan, shadow puppetry, and Javanese dance at ISI Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her work explores the intersections of text, sound, video, performance art, and XR. After working at a virtual reality art space in Melbourne, Australia, she returned to Germany where she divides her time between Berlin and Bochum. She publishes in magazines and anthologies, shows films, media art works, and performances at various festivals. Her first collection of poems, complemented by poetry films titled “Lieder der Dreistigkeit (Songs of Audacity)” was published by Elif Verlag in 2022. Due to her post-Soviet family background she is particularly interested in the idiosyncracies of Eastern Europe, her most recent work explores political mythologies as well as propaganda mechanisms of the region. She also solo-hitchhiked from Germany to Singapore when she was 19. Website: www.katiasophiaditzler.com
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Jonas Erler first began studying art history, film studies and philosophy; now studying photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB). In 2022 he took part in the Connecting Talents program "Visegrád in Short(s)" of Filmfest Dresden under the mentorship of Csaba Bollók as well as the „BILDGESPRÄCHE“ workshop led by director Till Kleinert. For his films he works closely with the Chemnitzer Filmwerkstatt. Currently he is working as assistant director for Luise Donschen.
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Claudio San Emeterio de Lucas (Segovia, Spain, 2003), is a visual artist studying at the University of Salamanca and during the course 2023-2024 conducting an Exchange program at the Kunstakademie Münster. Specialising in Esculpture and media, he has been working in different aspects with space and digital areas. On top of that also has several years of experience in acting, especially in the area of theatre. Having done 2 small exhibitions in rural Spain and lately participating at Rundgang 2024 individually and in group projects within the class of Aeronaut Mik, additionally, In Spain participated in the student council as vice president of the Fine arts bachelor. Lately has started to work with video, interested in documentary film and archive, taking the preservation and analysis of sociological and environmental themes in rural Spain. https://www.instagram.com/emeterioluca/
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Pavel Serdyukov is an Israeli-Russian theatre and film director. He graduated from the Electrotheatre Stanislavsky Master Program in Theatre Directing and Moscow School of New Cinema in Film Directing. Besides, he is a PhD in Computer Science and an award winning researcher with the focus on artificial intelligence. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Pavel had left Russia and recently settled in Tel-Aviv. He has been recognized as an Artist-at-Risk by the same named organization and has recently been a resident at Artport, leading contemporary art institution in Israel. Pavel Serdyukov is inspired and driven by the issues regarding our relations and feelings toward the Other, the abuse of power and the nature of violence, which he touches on in his recent artistic practice, often drawing on contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytic thought. In his experimental approach to cinema, he is largely influenced by late Godard’s films with scripts mainly based on various quotes used in various ways to create a film dialogue. His film "Meetings. Episode 1" participated in the International Competition of Oberhausen Film Festival 2021, and also later won the main competition at the major Russian festival for experimental films "The Spirit of Fire". Recently, he finished the production of the second part in these "series" making another attempt toward inventing "object-oriented cinema" shifting focus from human narratives to the perspectives of non-human entities, challenging viewers to reconsider art and perception. While the previous film was made in the genre of a fiction film and focused on everyday objects, this second film is created at the intersection of fiction and post-documentary form and focusing on art works.
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