V-F-X LJUBLJANA: IS IT FUTURE ... OR IS IT PAST?

We will open the fifth edition of the V-F-X Ljubljana festival at three venues: the overture will take place at the Slovenian Cinematheque with a surprise screening preceded by The Future Ahead Is Going To Be Weird AF, Part 1 (2024), a short film by Silvia Dal Dosso, a researcher of digital technologies and memes. The screening is part of our partner cooperation with Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, as is the multimedia exhibition EVA (Evil Vibrant Astute) 2.0 by Joanna Bacas and Socrates Stamatatos, which will open at Aksioma Project Space.

The V-F-X Ljubljana festival will officially open at Kino Šiška with Asbu, an AV performance by the duo SYNSPECIES (Elías Merino and Tadej Droljc), which will be followed by the opening of Droljc’s AV installation Fracture Point, whose aesthetic is characterised by laser structures that, as a superior force, affect the genesis of a new digital world.

The main part of the festival will then unfold at the Slovenian Cinematheque, where the horizons of the gaze will be examined through a two-part programme of Australian contemporary films and videos titled Composite Landscapes and curated by the guest curator Sam Mountford. The programme presents the ways and practices with which the artists resist and deconstruct the colonialist (and neoliberal) image of Australian nationality.

A special experience in the Silvan Furlan Hall will be provided by Phosphène, an AV performance by Armand Lesecq, a French interdisciplinary artist and composer. Through it, he explores the concept of expanded cinema by way of an inversion – for the projection, the film screen is replaced by the audience’s closed eyelids.

Also on view will be two works by the acknowledged French artist Boris Labbé. Glass House is a multi-award-winning audiovisual spectacle that was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s unrealised idea and reflects the artist’s response to the new digitally intertwined reality of 21st-century society. Labbé also explores the same subject in this year’s VR Point with another award-winning work – Ito Meikyū.

One of the festival constants is the programme section Vistas, curated by the festival team. Its first two programmes titled Is It Past? and Is It Future? show film/video works that explore the materiality of the medium and thereby direct the gaze towards various coordinates of social memories and play with the innovative potentialities of new media. The third programme of the section titled Is It Timeless? has been prepared by our guest curators, who work for important European film archives and film festivals. They will also participate in the panel discussion titled Archives and the Search for National (Film) Identity.

Another programme constant worthy of particular mention is the section What’s Cooking?, a curated programme of films by students of four Slovenian art academies (UL AGRFT, UL ALUO, AVA, AU UNG), which show a particularly attentive and innovative spirit of young artists. As part of the festival, the results of the pre-festival workshop for students From Analogue to Digital, led by artist Neža Knez, will be presented in the café of the Slovenian Cinematheque.

The festival will be complemented by Between Body and Space III: Vertical Horizon, a programme in which SCCA Ljubljana and the Slovenian Cinematheque have, since March, been presenting the video/film oeuvre of the visual artist and filmmaker Nataša Prosenc Stearns as part of their regular cooperation. We will conclude the festival with the Slovenian treat Alpe-Adria UndergroundI (2024) by Matevž Jerman and Jurij Meden, which recalls the marginalised or forgotten history of experimental cinema from the time of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.

The Festival team