EMAF 2026 - Die Ausstellung

The exhibition curated by Inga Seidler An Incomplete Assembly at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück shows current, international works of media art, most of which were selected via the annual public call for entries. The assembled positions were created in recent years and range from installations to filmic works and installations to digital interventions.

The thematic starting point of the exhibition is the assembly: the coming together of voices, images, bodies and temporal orders. Where such constellations recur, processes are ritualized and narratives are stabilized, institutional structures are formed. They organize the public sphere, regulate participation, mark affiliation, order - and produce exclusions.

Institutions do not appear as static entities or clearly defined organizations, but as a performative order: as an assemblage of spatial arrangements, media framings and temporal regimes that structure perception and shape behaviour. The participating artists examine how such orders are created - through repetition, synchronization, spatial placement and narrative coding - how they manifest themselves and how they are constantly recreated in performance. At the same time, they ask where these structures become fragile and what other forms of coming together become visible in them.

Robin Kötzle's two-channel installation Sehen wer wir sein (s|w)ollten analyzes the medial construction of political events. Excerpts from the East German Aktuelle Kamera and the West German Tagesschau, which reported on protests between 1952 and 1991, are shown synchronously. If an event does not occur in the other system, the screen remains black. In this formal precision, ideological framings, linguistic codings and historical voids become tangible. Visibility proves to be the result of an institutional decision - as something that can be produced and also denied.

In Built to Order I Bethan Hughes focuses on a housing estate in Berlin-Neukölln and examines architecture as a projection surface for social ideas. Archive material, found footage and newly shot footage unfold on two opposing screens, condensed in an interplay with sculpture, light and sound. Hughes shows how surveillance, discipline, projection and racialized attributions are inscribed in built structures. Architecture does not function as a neutral background, but as an active co-producer of social order.

Bianca Baldi adds a temporal dimension to this perspective. In Hear her calendar system a year of thirteen months she takes a photograph of a fig tree in Ethiopia from the family archive as her starting point. From this she develops an examination of colonial administrative and calendar systems. Video, drawings and a vocal composition overlay linear and cyclical time models. The tree appears as a more-than-human witness to historical violence and at the same time as the embodiment of alternative concepts of time. History becomes legible here not as a closed chronology, but as a changeable structure.

Sarah Reva Mohr examines power dynamics in social and physical spaces and in the relationship between humans and animals. The work sensational view, tired screams also deals with an institutionally organized space: the Barcelona Zoo. The installation unfolds a multi-layered analysis of the zoo as a place between the promise of care and the exercise of power. Different perspectives make colonial gaze regimes and the aestheticization of control visible. The zoo becomes an apparatus in which seeing, knowledge and hierarchy intertwine and social power relations materialize.

In Jarramplas Yalda Afsah examines a centuries-old ritual in Piornal, Spain, in which a costumed villager is pelted with turnips by the crowd. The filmic work focuses on the structure of the gathering: on the condensation of bodies, collective action and the dynamics that arise when individual gestures synchronize in a group. By keeping key elements of the event out of the frame, Afsah shifts the focus from the folkloric narrative to the mechanisms by which community is formed.

With the Alternative Monument for Germany Alternative Monument collective shifts the examination of institutionalized memory into the public and digital space. The augmented reality project has no permanent physical form, but is activated situationally via mobile devices. Visual collages, sculptural elements and sound fragments combine individual narratives of migration, exile and displacement. The monument is not created here through materiality or duration, but through collective actualization. Memory can be experienced as a polyphonic process that eludes any definitive fixation.

As part of the talks, curated by Franziska Pierwoss, a workshop with the Alternative Monument collective will open up the "Alternative Monument for Germany" as a lively platform for exchange and experimentation - and will explore with the participants how a contemporary monument to migration can be designed together in public space.

The works in An Incomplete Assembly show institutions as choreographies of images, bodies and temporal structures that direct behaviour and organize belonging. By exposing media voids, architectural inscriptions, temporal grids and the politics of memory, they open up spaces in which order does not appear as a given, but as negotiable.

The 39th European Media Art Festival will take place from April 22 to 26, 2026. The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be on display beyond the festival period until May 25, 2026.

About the festival:
The EMAF is internationally regarded as one of the most influential forums for contemporary media art. Every year, it offers its visitors an overview of current artistic productions in film programs, exhibitions, performances and hybrid formats. Guest-curated projects and retrospectives provide in-depth insights into historical positions and contexts. Every year, the EMAF brings together international artists, curators, researchers, students and people interested in film and art.