EMAF - Witnessing Witnessing

In order to orientate ourselves in the world, we are in contact with it in a sensory and perceptual way. We scan it with our senses, thereby also adjusting our proximity to and distance from others. In films, installations, sound works, performances and spoken contributions, this year's thematic focus Feelers, Sensors explores the role of sensory perception in the human and non-human experience of the world and how a technologically enhanced sensorium changes orientation and interaction in the world, making it shareable and communicable in a different way.

We are observing an increasing privatisation of space, which also manifests itself in our sensory relationship to the world, for example when we use noise cancelling to isolate ourselves from disturbing external stimuli. Online communication, as well as "smart" or "sensitive" technologies, are changing the way we interact with each other through our senses, raising the question of what forms of inclusion or alienation they promote. At the same time, formats in physical space - from group meditations to demonstrations - can communalise or organise sensual and emotional experiences.

Finally, what challenge does the sentience of other living beings pose for human self-understanding and responsibility for their habitats? What or who is perceived, publicly seen or heard is a political question. How can suffering that exceeds the individual's ability to perceive or paralyses speech remain communicable? How can we develop more sensitive antennae and fairer sensors?

An exhibition and three film programmes are being created for the thematic focus, which will be accompanied and interactively expanded by other live formats such as performances, workshops and talks. They are intended to serve as spaces for encounters and exchange.

Statements and bios of the curators

Inga Seidler - Exhibition The exhibition deals with the possibilities and limits of sensory perception and the environments it opens up. In addition to the human senses, it also looks at the perceptual abilities of plants and animals as well as machine perception. In the context of artificial intelligence, this term refers to the ability of computers to absorb and process sensory information in such a way that it resembles human perception of the world. In particular, the works in the exhibition raise questions about the roles that technology (could) play in the context of perception, experience and the creation of meaning.

Inga Seidler has been working as a curator with digital culture and media art for many years. Her current activities include exhibitions and programmes for the EMAF, Kassel Dokfest and the Goethe Institute. She is a board member of anorak e. V. and part of several advisory committees and juries.

Jamie Crewe - Film programme In Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), the American author, anthropologist and filmmaker Zora Neale Hurston tells of Haitians who are "ridden" by Guedé, a "god of mockery". Through her mouth, Guedé says: "Tell my horse", and goes on to engage in spectacular abuse and behaviour. His horses utter curses, defame their rulers, prance and gallop, splash their eyes with rum or plunge to their deaths. As the mouthpiece of their god, they can say or do things that they would not be able to do unridden. Deprived of speech, humans or horses - mind or body - find other forms of expression: no silence is permanent.

Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte head. She grew up in the Peak District in England and currently lives in Glasgow, Scotland. Jamie reflects on limitations: the way people are moulded by their cultures, environments and relationships, and the things that fall away from them as a result.

Oraib Toukan - film programme Is this really the wonderful Palestinian poet and author Mahmoud Alshaer asking, "Is that my own mouth saying: gas, flour, drinking water, washing water, coffee, biscuits, qasef, zananah, tayarah, tuna, beans, cup, battery, internet, connect, disconnect, oven, fire, yeast, salt, sugar, mattresses, sheets, pillow, carpet?" Pain transmitted in real time. Command tab. Silence. Feelers, sensors------from where in the body should we find out? From this earth that makes life worth living, says Mahmoud Darwish. "From the hesitation of April, the smell of bread at dawn ... the beginning of love, moss on a stone." This programme focuses on the heart as a fundamental sensory organ - an organ whose task is to see and hear. To this end, works that deal with suffering are combined with works that deal with desire. Ultimately, both are presented as one and the same.

Oraib Toukan is an artist, writer and teacher. Her publications include the book Sundry Modernism (Sternberg Press, 2017) and the films Via Dolorosa (2021) and When Things Occur (2017). She received her PhD in Fine Arts from Oxford University, Ruskin School of Art (2019).

Anna Zett - film programme Audiovisual media connect dots in one's own imagination with dots in the imagination of other people. The network of perceptions, narratives and symbols that emerges is, like the memory in the individual brain, not a realistic image of reality. It is a reality of its own - a social dream. What role do I play as a spectator, how much freedom am I given to participate in the process of this association? What happens to me at the moment of reception, what do I allow, what do I reject? The programme understands filmmaking and film viewing as a participatory, poetic practice, driven by the desire for connection and supported by the conviction that a shared reality is constantly emerging anew between individual sensations and perceptions.

Anna Zett is an artist and author. Her analytical and emotional practice questions dominant structures and creates space for open dialogue, personal experience and free association. This results in films, books, radio plays, installations and participative live formats that are shown in an international art context and at festivals.

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