© Ezra Šimek
Annual theme – curated by Barbara Kiolbassa
In outlaw lullaby, Ezra Šimek combines footage of two journeys: a winter road trip through the South and Midwest of the USA – across the landscapes of the Bible Belt and ‘Trump’s America’ – and a collective journey to Bihać, a border town in Bosnia and Herzegovina characterised by migration and displacement. Endless landscapes and border realities, fragments of conversations with pop-cultural fragments, and the nostalgia of the eternal question of belonging intermingle. The work was created as part of the WHW Akademija Zagreb 2025, which dealt with poetry and borders under the title “Remember Freedom”, and was premiered at the closing exhibition “To move, to stay, to return” at the GMK Galerija Zagreb.
Darks Miranda works with film, performance and ceramics. In her practice, she explores phantasmagorical connections between landscape, utopia, ruins and fantasy. Her work “Uma noite perigosa na ilha de Vulcano/A Dangerous Night in Volcano Island” consists entirely of found footage from science fiction films from the 1950s to the 1980s. Darks Miranda has carefully distilled the overlooked spaces between the often politically situated films: Shots that show nothing other than boundless, deserted, imaginary, cinematically designed landscapes. From the remnants of dystopian fictions, a cosmic journey emerges that takes us with colours, sounds, rhythms and atmospheres to a newly invented planet, far out into the silent boundlessness of space.
