Participants

The Seminar leader

Galit Eilat, a researcher, writer, and curator, is known for her projects that aim to create conditions for collective encounters and experiences with a critical perspective on the existing status quo. Central to these projects is her unwavering belief in the power of art to spark social imagination, driving the dissemination of knowledge. Eilat was the founding director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art and the inaugural artistic director of the Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne. She co-founded Maarav, an online arts and culture magazine; She co-initiated the traveling seminars Liminal Spaces, a platform for joint work and dialogue between Palestinians, Israelis, and international artists. She curated and co-curated projects such as VideoZone 4 – Video Art Biennial in Tel Aviv, the Polish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, the 32nd October Salon in Belgrade, and the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial.

Her current research focuses on extreme environments and future ecologies. In addition to her curatorial work, Eilat teaches and has written extensively about art and politics. Eilat received the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism at Bard College for the 2017-18 academic year.

The Seminar participants

Vivek Jain (1998), a Viewfinder Cinematography Masters’ alumnus, I was recently an artist-in-residence at Fabrica and am now pursuing doctoral research at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School. Driven by multi-faceted curiosity, my work is analogous to practice-based artistic research. From social history to behavioural science, biological evolution to cultural trends, every bit of knowledge out there shapes my critical thinking and, hence, my creativity. As an audio-visual artist, I explore the entangling narratives of the social, political and ethical. Building upon the learnings I garner as a lifelong student of Storytelling and Cinema, my practice is an attempt to realise art that exists in a symbiotic relationship with epistemology. In a world brimming with fiction, I wish to extend my enquiries to imagine and create realities beyond the obsolete logic of progress while bringing forth marginalised perspectives without confining to the normative anthropocentric parameters.

Website: www.innominatevivek.com
Social Media: @innominatevivek

Veronika Günther is a visual artist working in drawing. A graduate of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, she currently lives and works in Munich. Her brush drawings in black and red ink cover all of life, with a focus on relationships, food, sex, travel, chance, and pop culture. Her work has been shown at the Triennale de Gravure at La Boverie in Liège, Belgium; Galerie Krobath in Vienna, Austria; Espace Louis Vuitton in Munich; Galerie der Künstler*innen in Munich; and Galerie Perpétuel in Frankfurt/Main, among other locations. So far she has published five volumes of artist’s books with collected drawings, and several experimental movies of drawings and intertitles. Over the past year, live drawing performances with beamer or overhead projector have become an additional part of her work. In 2024 she was commissioned to create a mural for the cocktail bar Suzy B. in Munich. She received the Simacek Art Award in 2023 and the Willi Münzenberg Forum Art Award in 2020. She was assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, and has held a teaching assignment for drawing at Kunsthochschule Kassel from 2022 until 2024.

Website: www.veronikaguenther.com
Instagram: www.instagram/veronikgunthe

photo by Jochen Splett

photo by Felix Karle

Born in Regensburg, Lars Smekal lives in Mainz and works as a director and author. In his works, he deals with social issues in terms of content. He is particularly interested in people who are underrepresented and the question of how we want to live together as a society. Smekal sees himself as a European and was able to build up a good network through his Europe-wide festival participations.

He completed his bachelor's degree in Art History, German Studies, and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Regensburg in 2017. In 2018, he was awarded the Deutschlandstipendium for his top academic grades and special social commitment. In 2022, he completed his master's degree at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences in the "Time-Based Media" program. His graduation film Memories of a Forgotten Childhood was funded by HessenFilm und Medien and celebrated its world premiere in San Diego (USA).

Website: www.larssmekal.de
Instagram: www.instagram.com/larssmekal/

Rachel Glassman is a Toronto-born, Tel Aviv-based filmmaker and photographer. She studied Film Production at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), where she developed a deep appreciation for small-gauge analog filmmaking and experimental documentary practices. Her work often explores themes of memory, observation, and the recontextualization of archival footage. She is currently studying online with the Baltic Analog Lab Film School, using these studies to inform her latest project; a short documentary that examines the acts of witnessing and recording via street photography in Kutaisi, Georgia. In this current phase of her practice, she is especially focused on experimenting with genre as a way to challenge conventional modes of storytelling.

Website: rglassman.com
Instagram: @glassmany

Shiyi Shen is a scholar, filmmaker, and stage artist born in Suzhou, China. Currently based in New York, she is pursuing a MA in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Specializing in analog art practices such as 16mm film and theater, her work often explores the textures of various media and fosters dialogues between the individual and broader spatial and temporal contexts.
Her research interests focus on Documentary/Nonfiction Film History, Transnational and Diasporic Film History, and Queer Media Studies. Former papers include: Beyond Festival Screens: Vernacular Digital Moving Images in Voicing Chinese Queer Expression, and Swag Mothers: Marginalized Realities of Young Motherhood in China's Short Video Era.

Anna Mundet Molas is a filmmaker, artist-researcher, and climate activist based in Barcelona, with a BA and MA in Cinematography and Media Studies. Her work explores the intersection of ecology, image, and technology and she combines new media tools and experimental audiovisual forms, often drawing on archival materials, curatorial practices, speculative fiction, scientific cinema, and community-based processes of mediation and participation. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, focusing on speculative visual studies, environmental humanities, and critical AI. As a climate activist, Anna works on degrowth, post-industrial futures, and critical perspectives on digitalization and technological infrastructures. Her films have been screened at D’A Film Festival, Academia Film Olomouc, Braga Science Film Fest, BCN Film Fest, among others. She has taken part in Cultures d’Avenir (CCCB, Pompidou, Gaîté Lyrique, HKW) and the Pelion Summer Lab (University of Thessaly), and has completed research stays at the University of Texas and the University of St. Andrews. In 2023, she served on the NEST jury at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Website: https://mundetmolas.com/

Petr Vašků
I studied scriptwriting and dramaturgy at Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno and focus on documentary cinema and experimental audiovisual approaches. In my practice, I try to display the invisible, hidden or marginalized in the sight of society (people without housing, art-brut artist, Theatre group Aldente in which actors with the Down syndrome perform).
Currently, I am shooting an audiovisual essay in a small tapestry manufacture, which collaborates with modern and contemporary Czech painters and artists (Mikuláš Medek, Josef Čapek, Petr Nikl, Karel Malich, beside others). The sublime and highly artistic craft of tapestry hand-weaving is, unfortunately, slowly disappearing. I am fascinated not only by the patience and deep concentration but also the intermedial connections and the tension between representation and presence of audiovisual media when transposing the specific time/space of both physical tapestry and process of its creation.
Recently, I have started experimenting with 8mm film, 16mm film, liquid light technique and generally expanded cinema approaches. In my practice, I treat protagonists, media and their respective materialities as co-creators, diminishing the romantic notion of “strong authorship” and expanding the term documentary film into the moving image territory and site-specific intermedial exhibition.
Currently, I continue in an artistic research PhD. and apart from that I utilize the concepts and approaches of experimental media archaeology. Occasionally, I direct music videos, publish poems, review movies and documentaries in Czech Television Art, and write short essays about film and literature in Host magazine.

Bru Laboissière da Silva (1988) is an artist from Goiânia, Brazil. Her first film, which she directed, shot, and co-produced, was the feature-length documentary “Fabiana”. It premiered at the Rotterdam Festival 2019, and 40 other festivals screened it, including IndieLisboa, the Málaga Festival, the São Paulo International Film Festival, the Brasília Festival of Brazilian Cinema, and Olhar de Cinema 2018 (Audience Award). Commercial distribution, including MUBI Brazil, began in 2021.
In 2021, the short film “I look forward to our independence” premiered at the Oberhausen SFF in the International Competition. She co-directed it with Bruna Carvalho Almeida and also photographed it. Twenty other festivals screened it, including Olhar de Cinema, Bogoshorts, and the Lille Festival. It was licensed to MUBI Brazil and Brazilian TV channels.
She has two films in development. “Between Times”, a hybrid film, participated in the development lab at DocMontevideo 2019 (Uruguay), where it received an award from the Miradasdoc Festival (Spain). “Beehives”, a fiction feature, was awarded for best script in the PanLab 2024 from the Festival Panorama (Brazil).
In 2021, Brunna undertook an eight-month artistic residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. In 2020, she was one of the directors selected for Talents Buenos Aires and, in 2024, for IDFAcademy. She holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo.

Website: https://unna.art.br/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bru.laboissiere/

photo by Romy Richter

Leon Meschede (b. 1999, Halle/Saale, Germany) is a Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores how history is constructed, remembered, and politicized particularly in the context of East Germany post-socialist identity. His essay films blend archival material, interviews, and fictional elements to reimagine political memory and 'lost futures,' influenced by hauntology, speculative fiction, and postmemory theory.
He studied Fine Arts at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design and spent semesters abroad at Seoul National University and in Mongolia. His recent work 'The Eastgerman Futurists' received the Jury Award at the 2025 Art Prize of the Saalesparkasse Foundation.
He has received scholarships and grants from the DAAD, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the Korean International Cooperation Agency.
His films have been presented at the Art Foundation of Saxony-Anhalt (Halle/Saale, Germany), gr_und (Berlin, Germany), Galerie KUB (Leipzig, Germany), Ecobuddy Institute (Seoul, South Korea), The Nordic House (Reykjavík, Iceland) and Lkham Gallery (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia).
Currently he is a Fellow of the Werkleitz Professional Media Master Class (PMMC 25), where he is producing a new short film, further exploring forms of speculative documentary and poetic historiography across East/West contexts.

Website: https://www.leonmeschede.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meschede.leon

Maria Zaikina is a visual artist and production designer, born in Moscow. She currently lives and works in Munich, Berlin and Malaga.
She graduated from VGIK (Russian State Institute of Cinematography) and has worked on over 40 film projects. Her films were selected for Berlinale, Rotterdam, and Sundance.
Expanding her practice beyond cinema, Maria studied Media Art at the Rodchenko Art School and earned her MA degree from ENSAPC (École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Paris-Cergy) in 2024. She is currently studying Media Art at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Julian Rosefeldt’s class).
She has participated in residencies in Iceland, Russia, and France (NES, SIM, Blönduós, Cité internationale des arts, NCCA, Nikel, PolArt).
Her practice merges film, installation, and performance, exploring spaces of utopias, dystopias, human dreams, radical hospitality, and existential solitude.
Her video work Arrival of the Train (2018) invites residents of a small Icelandic town to imagine, through sound, the arrival of the first train in the country’s history. The work was screened at the Invisible Cinema Festival (St. Petersburg, 2019), Unfiltered Cinema (Minsk, 2020), and Berlin Revolution Film Festival (Berlin, 2021).
Among her recent projects are the total installation Waiting Room (2019), created in a former train station in Nikel and based on residents' responses to the question "What are you waiting for?"; the installation A Garden City Will Be Here(2021) in Norilsk, dedicated to growing plants in the risky farming zone beyond the Arctic Circle; the video Morning Meditations (2022), exploring the rise of esoteric practices in post-pandemic society; and the experimental road-movie installation After Party (2023–2024), a journey through memory, space, and time towards New Year’s Eve 2023 in Moscow.
She is currently working on Night Light and a documentary about spaces of dialogue and empathy in Berlin.

Mariazaikina.com
Instagram: @mazaikinaa