Surreal animations, digital worlds with endless logic, and projections that defy the traditional confines of an urban gallery. The eighth edition of the Kinomural festival in Wrocław will take place on 18 and 19 September. Over these two days,we’ll see 113 works by 67 masters of animation, including the monumental Extraweg projections, Peter Burr’s four-channel special project, and new experiments with form that are transforming the festival into a fully-fledged laboratory for new media art. Admission to the event is free. What have the organisers got in store?
From the outset, Kinomural has been rooted in a simple yet radical idea: art that we usually view on a phone screen, computer screen, in a gallery or at the cinema can be brought directly into the urban space. The walls of the tenement blocks in Nadodrze become giant screens, and the audience moves between different locations, creating their own route through the programme.
The headliner of this year’s edition, themed ‘ The Endless Cycle’, will be Extraweg. At the same time, the festival is experimenting more than ever with its own format: Peter Burr has prepared a special project to be screened simultaneously on four walls, whilst Krzysztof ‘Kuki’ Iwański will present the exhibition Ghosts of Tomorrow.
Animation, digital video and generative imagery are now part of everyday visual culture: in TV series, music videos, concerts and the marketing of major brands. Kinomural extracts them from these cycles and gives them a different scale, pace and audience. The theme linking this year’s seven programme sections is repetition: the loop as rhythm, habit, error, memory and the mechanism of everyday life. However, it is not about returning to an identical point.
From geology to an overloaded feed
At the heart of the programme is the main section, curated by the event’s organisers – Piotr and Bartek Bartos – and divided across two walls: THE PRIMAL LOOP and THE LOOP OF IMPULSES.
The former focuses on repetitions hidden within changes of scale, memory and process. Among the featured artists are Boris Labbé, who in *Orogenesis* compresses millions of years of geological changes in the Pyrenees into a few minutes; Conner Griffith, who analyses the visual excess of advertising and social media in *A Sense of Getting Closer*, a work created in collaboration with Max Cooper; and Edwin Rostron and Max Hattler, who treat rhythm, geometry and abstraction as material that acts directly upon perception.
The second is more physical and direct. Repetition acts as a stimulus here. The programme features, amongst others, Emanuele Kabu, Damien Looney, Mario Ruggiero, Brandon Eversole and L00p.
Looney works with what technology usually tries to eliminate: interference and noise. He also points out that complex software hides its own mechanisms from the user, and that art can make them visible again – along with the work behind the technology.
Ruggiero, for his part, often uses repetition to defuse images of violence and catastrophe. An explosion or a building collapse are repeated until they cease to function solely as a shock and begin to reveal their own structure. As the artist observes: ‘Shock no longer even needs our consent. It only needs our attention.’
From a mobile phone screen to the wall of a tenement block
The headliner of the eighth edition is Oliver Latta, known as Extraweg – a Berlin-based artist and director whose surreal 3D animations have become one of the most recognisable languages of contemporary motion design. He has won two Primetime Emmy Awards for the opening sequences of the first and second seasons of the series *Separation*, has collaborated with Valentino, MTV and Bring Me The Horizon, and has held exhibitions at venues including Sotheby’s, Christie’s and the Venice Biennale.
In Extraweg’s works, bodies stretch, multiply, merge into a crowd, submit to systems and struggle against one another. He uses this surreal physicality to explore the invisible: social pressure, ambition, routine, the desire for closeness, fear and the need to conform to the rules.
The loop itself is, in fact, part of the meaning of his works. As Extraweg notes, it fits perfectly with contemporary internet culture: Work, consume, scroll, repeat. When an action has no real beginning or end, it can become amusing, uncomfortable or even frustrating. For me, the loop is more than just a technical format. It becomes part of the idea.
Peter Burr: a game you can’t win
Another of the key names at this year’s edition is Peter Burr, a New York-based artist who creates immersive, cinematic worlds using, amongst other things, tools drawn from the gaming industry. His works have been exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, the Barbican Centre and Documenta 14.
Burr is taking on a dual role this year. He is the curator of the STAN ZAPĘTLENIA wall, where he will showcase works by Yoriko Mizushiri, Réka Bucsi, Takeshi Murata and Meejin Hong, but he has also organised one of this year’s most unusual events: the Interstitial Maintenance project .
The installation will open both festival evenings. In Burr’s digital building, automated workers traverse grimy corridors, repairing successive breakdowns and attempting to keep the system running – a system that endlessly produces systemic faults and signs of decay. In an age of pandemics, wars and rapid technological advancement, the artist poses the question of the effort required to keep a structure alive. The scale of the Kinomural allows the artist to move away from the traditional screening format. The projection takes place simultaneously on four walls. Different characters, places and moments will appear on each of them. It is impossible to see everything.
Kinomural seeks new forms
The festival is increasingly treating urban projection not as a fixed format, but as a starting point for experimentation. A good example is *Ghosts of Tomorrow* by Krzysztof ‘Kuki’ Iwański, the artist also responsible for the visual identity of this year’s edition.
The exhibition on display at Concordia Design draws on a medium very different from the screen – the flag. Rather than representing a specific community, it refers to what we share and what is at risk of being lost: disappearing ecosystems, digital waste and the effects of climate migration.
– A flag is never neutral. Even without an emblem, it retains the memory of power, community, mobilisation and conflict. In *Ghosts of Tomorrow*, however, I shift this energy in a different direction. Instead of saying ‘this is ours’, the flag says ‘this is shared’ or ‘this is what we’re losing’,* explains Iwański. The artist deliberately moves away from literal depictions of the crisis. – I don’t want to shock people any more than necessary. I want to restore the importance of what we’ve stopped reacting to, ’ he emphasises.
All the walls in unison
Traditionally, the Kinomural does not guide the viewer along a single route. The six walls have separate programmes, which run simultaneously (over two days from 7.30 pm to 10.00 pm), and the individual sets are repeated throughout the evening. The audience can therefore start watching anywhere they like and put together a slightly different festival experience each time.
To conclude, the image will once again transcend the boundaries of a single screen: Tension by Hieu Vu, a motion designer and animator from Hanoi, will appear on all the festival’s walls. It will be accompanied by Masquerade by the British composer Thomas Farnon. For a moment, the six separate programmes and screens will thus become one. And then the whole cycle will begin anew.
The programme for this year’s edition is complemented by the OPEN CALL, DOBRANOCKA and ZŁANOCKA sections. The full programme, descriptions of the works and information about the artists are available at www.kinomural.com.
Kinomural. New Media Art Festival
18 and 19 September, 7.30 pm–10.00 pm.
Wrocław, Nadodrze
freeadmission
source: press materials
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