This film program originates from a yearlong seminar at the Department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, which investigates portraiture and self-portraiture as catalysts for producing fabulations. Fabulation, and its connection to storytelling, is understood as a process that allows us to summon “the missing people” in order to collectively imagine a “people to come” (Deleuze). The program presents various positions in cinema and contemporary art, exploring how different genres—fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental film—can be used, sometimes blending them together, to convey fabulation and speculations on alternative ways of belonging.

Program

Lav Diaz, Ang araw bago ang wakas (The day before the end), 2016, 17 min
Yto Barrada, Hand-Me-Downs, 2011, 15 min
Jannick Giger, Demian Wohler, Lamento, 2025, 17 min 
Meriem Bennani, Ghariba, 2017, 19 min
Enoch Cheng, Just Like Snakes, 2023, 21 min

Presented by the collective of curators: Katharina Lea Birkmann, Maja Bojanić, Yeonwoo Chang, Lukas Frank, Oscar Grunert, Anna Marie Aquino Lutz, Vladimir Nadein, Anastasiia Naumenko, Marcia Schmidt, and Viktor Schöll (in English)

The film program was curated collectively by Master students attending Bouchra Khalili’s seminar “Methods and Practices” at the Department of Artistic Strategies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. A second event scheduled June 18 will present works created by the students themselves. It will conclude a yearlong exploration of how to imagine community-making through the “singular as plural.”

Meriem Bennani, from: Ghariba, 2017, Courtesy, © Meriem Bennani