Karl F. Stewart: Impressions in MindPhotographs and VideoKarl F. Stewart makes a mark in digital photography and video with his saturated colors and his rigorous compositions showing urban landscapes. He works with a photographic hybrid combination between still images and videos that do not hide their origin in their photographic concept. After being a documentary photographer in the 70's in Pittsburgh, his home town, he worked as an English lecturer in Italy for 24 years, before he took up photography again only 5 years ago, now going fully digital.San Francisco, his next temporary residency after Italy, became his starting point for his relaunch in photography, where he mostly explored the downtown area. Not just the financial district of San Francisco, but a big part of the highly dense urban areas show an amazing economic growth with glossy surfaces and artificial contemporary green landscaping on one hand, and wide spread poverty of homeless people on the other. “The Unearthly Beauty of Simulated Nature in Contemporary Architecture” is Stewart's most pronounced piece from that period, presented as a video-photo essay. At the same time, the artist started exploring motion-blur and photoshop cut-outs. “Impressions of Movement” is a series of panoramic works that resulted and which he continued in different countries such as USA, Italy and France. The time-based presentation of digital pictures, that seems to be natural to the medium, led to digital video as his preferred medium at the moment. The artist recently moved to Düsseldorf, where he continues exploring landscapes and urban settings in often unearthly colors. Like with “K-20”, showing a small fountain at the K 20 Museum in Düsseldorf, the examinations of urban-nature relations combined with sometimes witty surprising experiments, seem to propel his creative energy most successfully.

A major event on the Canadian cinema scene for 44 years now, the Festival du nouveau cinéma has proven its ability to continually adapt to the most avant-garde audiovisual practices in the field.

During eleven days of festival : over 300 films (feature and short films) by directors from Québec, Canada and abroad, installations, performances, transmedia projects, cocktails, parties, conferences, and encounters are offered to the audience.

It is often noted that men and women inhabit space very differently, as evidenced by the popular Tumblr account, Men Taking Up Too Much Space on the Train. Photo after photo show male passengers with legs maximally splayed and arms raised to grasp a Very Important Newspaper, while women demurely cross their arms and legs with visible signs of discomfort. It doesn't take a professional philosopher or sociologist to realize that this stark contrast between spatial expansion and contraction is not a fact of biology but a set of learned behaviors. For most women, something has broken in the unifying chain of consciousness/body/world; an institutionalized double standard ensures that men enjoy the lion's share of free, unhindered, fluid movement in space.

The films in this program demonstrate various ways in which women filmmakers have sought to engage more fully with their world, oscillating between the savage critique of social norms and the affirmation of new powers and pleasures. It goes without saying that cinema, with its disjuncture of image and sound, its capacity for metamorphosis and even the grotesque, is one of the most powerful tools we have for the reconfiguration of body and voice.

Curated by Seth Watter