The 11th edition of the Now&After International Video Art Festival will take place this year, presenting the best works submitted for the competition by video artists from around the world. Thirty artists from Australia, Russia, Germany, Uzbekistan, France, India, Italy, Cuba, Great Britain, Japan, Lithuania, Brazil, Estonia, Austria, Argentina, USA, and South Africa will participate in Now&After’22.
The theme of Now&After’22 is THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE.
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible”.
We do not know the limits of the possible, but upon waking up one day, we may find ourselves across the Rubicon, in the impossible. And then suddenly it would turn out that we have not entered the beautiful future of flights to the stars and underwater ocean cities, but have fallen into the embodied dystopian nightmare of the great science- fiction authors. “Too much imagination is much rarer than too little,” Arthur C. Clarke notes in the same book. Lack of imagination cannot cope with envisioning the future and therefore often generates catastrophes in the present. For artists, this principle works the other way around, and a developed imagination gives them a glimpse into the present, the past, and the future. Video artists from easily overcome the barriers of the impossible. The bilingual prose poems of Eta Dahlia (Ashen Glow) draw us into a play of words and images. Winged by Lisi Prada follows the musical form effortlessly and almost manages to fly. Paulius Šliaupa’s philosophically pensive piece The Monk immerses us in measured images of the relationship between man and nature, addressing a sense of loss. Figures of Chantal Akerman and cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton create the rhythmic audio-visual fabric of Vivian Ostrovsky’s Son Chant.
Artists would like to change the world for the better with their work, whether they are looking at it through the eyes of a poet or explore the possibility of evil entering it. Alas, not everything is within their control; cruelty and violence remain companions of our lives, but as long as the portals from the possible to the impossible remain open to the imagination soaring towards the future, to kind feelings, love, and poetry, we will believe in the triumph of good.
International Video Art Festival Now&After’22 will be held from July 14 to August 15, 2022 at the Fabrika Center for Creative Industries.
by Marina Fomenko
Festival Director
International Video Art Festival Now&After is organized
by the autonomous nonprofit organization Media Art Centre Now&After
Curated by Marina Fomenko
