On 19 and 20 September, Wrocław will become a place of extraordinary artistic events. This is the new edition of Kinomural, a festival for lovers of art in public space. On these two evenings, selected tenements will be transformed into living pillars of visual storytelling. The organisers have prepared more than 500 projections by 90 artists from 20 countries, ranging from experimental animations to advanced 3D mappings. Bartek Bartos, one of the creators of Kinomural, told us about the background to this free event.
Kinomural is a festival without borders: from moving murals to audiovisual installations to immersive animations that take you out of your daily rhythm. Streets that pulsate with routine the day before, breathe light after sunset and become an interactive gallery. Behind this colourful spectacle is the idea of the two Bartos brothers, who decided to turn Wrocław into a giant open-air gallery.
The festival programme entitled “Odyssey: The Beta Version” combines mythical narrative and futuristic aesthetics. Look out for projects by Yoshi Sodeoki, who has previously brought 95 screens to life in Times Square, or Peter Burr, a master of computer animation from Brooklyn, as well as artists selected in the international Open Call. Kinomural 2025 is a celebration accessible to all. The free, open-air festival invites residents and visitors of Wrocław to explore the nighttime illuminations. All you need to do is bring comfortable shoes, an open mind and prepare for an encounter with art that transcends walls and illuminates space.
Kamil Białas: What are the biggest logistical challenges in organising the event?
Bartek Bartos: It is a months-long process of paperwork due to the multitude of entities under the necessary permits. For the projection on each of the walls, we have to obtain permits from the managers of the projector site, the managers of the audience site, the managers of the building on which the projection will be displayed, the managers of any lighting whose light falls on the projection wall – for each wall, sometimes it is 2-3 entities, and sometimes even 6.
The uniqueness of the formula – due to the lack of similar events is a trailblazer, many entities did not know at the start how to qualify us in terms of formalities, which piled up problems. The issue of the uniqueness of the festival formula is important, we always have to use several walls close to each other, but with the right distances for the screenings, not too close and not too far away, without windows. If it wasn’t for Marianna, the festival’s main producer, this project would never have come about. Marianna has been with us from the beginning, she likes puzzles and has a gift for materialising crazy ideas.
This year’s theme combines mythology with science fiction. How did you select works to reflect this idea and what does it say about contemporary new media art?
The Odyssey motif of the hero’s journey refers to the basic monomyth of our species – the boogeyman’s journey. It is one of the most important points in our human constitution or programming – to refer to very present terminology. He links yet with the Campbellian concept of the ‘hero with a thousand faces’, i.e. the cultural universality of our archetypes, which are stored in our collective unconscious, i.e. that part of the hard drive with the basic system code. In a nutshell, Ulysses and the cosmonaut from 2001 Space Odyssey differ only in setting, the story is the same.
I have an unfortunate tendency sometimes to over-intellectualise art, looking for the key and delving into the science, but Kinomural gave me room for this kind of intellectual-artistic play. The general idea is that humans are narrative beings, it is only through auto narrative that we recognise ourselves in space-time. Narrative is also a way of organising our experience of time. And now we finally get to the point, new media art is often non-narrative, it is like audiovisual abstract painting. We asked ourselves the question: when you watch such works in a cinemomural format (and they make up well over half of what we show) without a typical narrative, do you by any chance form a story? You’ve got two and a half hours, that’s how long one night of the festival lasts, you’ve got six walls, over 100 films of various lengths, you go off and create your own personal, unique screening. Well, and what are you with at the end of the screening? That’s why the Odyssey theme resonated so much with us about how we experience Kinomural. A wall as a chapter, a chapter as another port, and all of this in a ‘beta’ or test version. You are the beta tester of our idea, the artists’ ideas and your perception.
Kinomural hosts both legends and debutants. What does the curatorial process look like and what determines whether a particular work makes it to the festival wall?
We have a two-pronged curatorial process until a theme, an idea for an edition of the festival, is developed. Piotrek, my brother and co-creator of the festival, is constantly on the lookout for artists and works that in his opinion are suitable for the Kinomural. We create our database, we look at the artists we know and who have already been presented, we look at what is happening on portals related to audiovisual art, we send each other the most interesting projects. I work on a theme for the edition and somewhere around November I present my idea to the team and we start working together. We work out the concept and start selecting artists, that’s it in a nutshell.
What criteria do you pay most attention to – the theme, the form, the technology or the experience of the artist?
Every creator has to start at some point, which is why we have been cooperating with the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław for many years and every year we present works by students who create works dedicated to Kinomural. Experience is not a key criterion for us, we show ‘veterans’ such as this year’s festival star Yoshi Sodeoka, but there are many artists in the main section who are not widely known and a small number of folowers on Instagram does not prove their artistic level, often quite the opposite. The subject matter of course determines what goes on the walls, but there are also times when something we like on a computer screen will unfortunately not work in such a large format as a tenement wall. Things that are typically cinematic, created from realistic shots, rarely work, and audiovisual installations don’t always work either, but I can’t hide the fact that we often know intuitively whether to point the thumb up or down.
The strongest points of this year’s event are…?
Obviously the wall of our star this year Yoshi Sodeoka, two nights and two different projects. For me, this is a kind of meditation on time and space. From the artists of the main section, it’s definitely O FUTURE, Arnaud Laffond and Thomas Pons. Their works will be presented on the ECHOHATER wall. It is no coincidence that we are presenting two works by each of them. The wall curated by Peter Burr – RECREATIONAL DEATH (the title speaks for itself!), is really strong stuff, very different six works but forming a coherent story.
The Zlanocka section, which we are creating with the Correlations Festival, is a unique form in general, to existing outstanding animations (often internationally awarded) Polish artists, poets, poets, writers, writers, musicians have created their own original narratives, so a new work is created. For this project, we have invited min. Daria from Silesia, Ilona Witkowska, Beata Kwiatkowska, Tomek Tryzena.
Finally, a hard hit. Simultaneously on all the walls at 21:57 we will show the Epilogue of our Odyssey Beta version, a work by Thomas Vanz with music by Max Cooper “Hope”. It is a visual poem about the journey of thought in a neuronal network that has a cosmic dimension. Vanz shows the complexity of the brain in this audiovisual symphony, and this micro-world is reflected in the image of the universe. At the same time, I suggest keeping the title of the edition in mind. Everyone will have their own personal Odyssey, creating from these separate works their own personal two-and-a-half-hour screening, their own story to take with them.
How do you see Kinomural developing in five years’ time – as an international festival, an arts platform or something completely new? Or do you dream of organising an event in a specific city, location?
Kinomural is already an important event for artists on the map of audiovisual events in the world, this makes us very happy. I sometimes wonder what Kinomural will be in 5-10 years. Will this formula of ours evolve? It’s also a question of how cities will change? We used to dream that there would be more and more of these walls at the same time, that it would happen simultaneously in several places in a city. For the time being, we are focusing on Wrocław, but who knows, maybe there will be an accompanying edition somewhere in Europe? Seeing how the world has accelerated through the presence of Ai, I know that there is no point in looking far ahead, because everything has accelerated like never before. Will technology be just another new tool in the hands of artists? I don’t know and that’s exciting.
Further festival announcements and preparations can be followed on social media: Facebook, Instagram and at www.kinomural.com.
Kinomural. New media arts festival
19-20 September 2025, 19:30-22:00
Wrocław, Nadodrze
Free event, admission free
source: Kinomural, edited by
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