Garage Museum of Contemporary Art and Moscow International Experimental Film Festival (MIEFF) continue their strategic partnership with a program that includes a world premiere of Lawrence Lek’s AIDOL on the awakening of artificial intelligence and three Russian premieres: an almost silent horror film The Children of the Dead by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška; an abstract journey Memento Stella by experimental filmmaker Makino Takashi and the feminist satire Make Me Up by Rachel Maclean. On the closing night Garage will award The Coming World Prize to the film in this year’s competition that resonates with the questions raised in the exhibition of the same name.
A sequel to his Geomancer currently screened in The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030-2100 at Garage, AIDOL by artist and filmmaker Lawrence Lek follows an AI satellite named Geo who writes songs for Diva, a pop star whose career is going downhill. Lawrence Lek will introduce the film and give a talk on the art and technology of the future based on the use of characters created by the artificial intelligence in his own work.
Another artist talk in the program is by Canadian artist Bahar Noorizadeh, who is featured in the festival’s competition with her work After Scarcity (2018) that explores planetary governance, computational architecture, and finance.
Other films in the program include The Children of the Dead by American artists Kelly Copper and Pavol Liška—a horror film that revisits the aesthetics of silent cinema and won the FIPRESCI Prize in the Forum section of the 69th Berlinale (2019); Memento Stella by Japanese video artist Makino Takashi—an abstract journey that explores the emergence of all phenomena; and Present.Perfect—Zhu Shengze’s radical found footage film, in which contemporary China presents itself as a total online show and which won the main prize at this year’s film festival in Rotterdam.
During the closing night at Garage Screen cinema an international jury will announce the winners of the festival, including the recipient of The Coming World prize, awarded by Garage on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name. The award ceremony will be followed by a Russian premiere of Make Me Up, a feminist satire by multimedia artist Rachel Maclean.
The festival is curated by Vladimir Nadein, Rita Sokolovskaya, and Dmitry Frolov with contributions from Garage Screen curator Evgeny Gusyatinsky.
